My Lords, the amendment in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, raises a really interesting issue, and I commend them for tabling it. It brings this Bill into contact with people, consumers and citizens.
When I read about the amendment, I thought back to my childhood, where in a medium-sized town in south Wales, there was the South Wales Electricity Board showroom, right in the centre among all the shops. You could get advice about your bills and you could speak to people, but it also had a showroom for the sale of electrical goods. Of course, in those days—and I am sure this started a long time before—the energy companies had a great interest in making sure that every family had a washing machine, a fridge-freezer and an electric cooker because it would boost the sale of their product. They were ensuring that we were all making the most of all the labour-saving devices that were coming forward in order to boost the sale of the units of electricity that they generated. It probably made very good business sense. However, times have changed and over the years energy companies have receded into the background. Now they are engaged mainly in a massive database management exercise, in which they try to keep interaction with the consumer to a bare minimum. I have been told that, from a supply company’s point of view, every time someone rings up it is money off the bottom line and it does not like it. Companies invest in call centres, which have become a modern job-creation exercise here and overseas. We can talk to people only on the phone. There is very little interaction on the high street.
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I am grateful to my noble friend Lord O’Neill for his comparison with the mobile phone industry. It is an interesting parallel. You could just interact with your mobile phone company through the internet, a database or a call centre. However, we choose not to. We go into a shop and ask for advice on different
tariffs. Carphone Warehouse and many others have an aggregation service. We want to pick up the phones, try them out and see which ones suit us. Telecommunications is a much simpler proposition. Energy is much more fundamental—telecommunications is a subset of energy—but it does not have that interface, which is curious. Whether it is government’s role to make this happen is a harder question. It is an interesting, probing idea.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox. We had a conversation about the digital world and what the high street of the future will look like. I said that it might seem very empty because things are moving to the internet. She said that, on the contrary, when we move more and more to digital services we will also need the high street. The services provided may be different, but people will still want to go to and use a town centre for all the convenience and ease that it provides. The noble Baroness said that when you order something on the internet and it turns up at your door, it is often quite inconvenient. It will come at the wrong time and you will get a horrible slip saying, “We called but you were out”—or you have to sit around for 12 hours waiting for your thing to arrive. She said that in future there would be sites in the high street where there would be deposit and collection services, and that the high street would be much more dynamic.
We do not need our energy companies to sell us fridges any more, but we might need them to take delivery of our fridge and then install it, or provide us with advice. There is something here about the nature of the industry and the degree to which it has hollowed itself out into a no doubt very efficient service. Is it very human? Does it provide the advice that people need?
I will say a word on technologies. As noble Lords on both sides of the Committee said, we are in a period of great change. The days when you simply plug in your kettle and do not think about it are slowly starting to change. Not everyone needs to think about it, but increasingly people are thinking about it. We have seen a quite rapid uptake of solar panels. Obviously, it speaks to some people in some way. The idea that you can make your own energy is attractive and appealing. The fact that you can even make money from it speaks to something human in us. Therefore, there is a need for proper information about these different technologies. They will continue to grow in number. Solar panels are perhaps the most visible example at the moment, but there are other technologies such as smart meters, which we discussed when we debated the previous amendment. There is also voltage optimisation. People who know me know that I have a particular interest in this. It is an interesting bit of kit that can take 10% off your electricity bill and that elongates the life of your electrical appliances. It is a win-win, but hardly anybody knows how voltage optimisers work, perhaps including many energy experts.
I have probably said enough. There is an issue here. I am not sure about the Government’s role, but perhaps they could provide the impetus for a public/private partnership, although I am not sure about the formulation. Having said that government should not provide it, I will just ask a question about the Energy Saving Trust,
which was part of the Government’s architecture and did, I believe, provide local outlets or offices. Does the Energy Saving Trust still have these local centres? If so, how many of them are there, what kind of visitors do they get and are they successful? If they do still exist, perhaps they could be built on. The fact that I do not know whether they exist is perhaps a bit of a sad indictment—I am not sure whether of me or of the trust. Perhaps I should know.
It is tempting to say that the private sector will do everything super-efficiently, but it will do it efficiently from its perspective. None the less, with a bit of encouragement, and perhaps some work with the likes of Citizens Advice, the Energy Saving Trust and more innovative entrants into the market, something could be looked at here to kick-start some fresh thinking.