In the other place, the Minister did try to give some explanation as to what these fees for energy resilience might be. My colleagues in the other place did press him quite hard, because one reading could see it as a way to discourage strike action in those sectors that deliver fuel or are connected with the energy sector. We were pleased to receive quite emphatic reassurances that these fees would not be applied to unions that sought to take strike action.
What seemed to emerge was that the fees are going to be levied on business in response to extreme events that it was almost impossible to predict. That could be anything but some examples were given. The Government
might need to step in and provide personnel to companies in the event of an outbreak of a flu pandemic and would want to recover the cost in fees. Then there was the potential for equipment or vehicles that the Government own to be deployed in the event of extreme weather or of a clean-up. Then there are the unspecified assets that might need to be provided in the short term to business. Really, this is the Treasury seeking a power to regain costs for that. What have we come to? Is the government budget so tight that we are introducing powers to claw back money for disaster situations? In reality, if a disaster strikes you want the Government to be able to respond. You do not want there to be any quibbling about costs being passed on or who will pay for what. Why do we—and companies—pay taxes? The Government are there to provide a service in the event of national security issues.
Maybe I am wrong and there are plenty of precedents for the Treasury introducing specific powers to recover money for specific unintended events. If there are, I stand corrected. However, my reading of this is that it is an extraordinarily broad power with almost no definition and very little accountability. For that reason, it does not have a place in this Bill. Obviously, as we go forward we know that there will be an increase in natural disasters that could potentially interrupt energy supply. In fact, we have quite a resilient system for dealing with that. The power companies and national grid are on the front line. Their licence requirements mean that they have to reconnect customers as soon as they can. When the large storms hit the Isle of Arran, SSE men in vans were out there fixing that problem. The Government were not involved. I suspect that the Government do not have the skills to address these issues.
It strikes me that this must be about military personnel. It can only be about military deployment because the department certainly does not have skilled engineers who can go and fix transmission lines. That is all done in the private sector. If it is about concerns about the military and the budget, this is quite a strange precedent to set, that there will somehow be fees applied to businesses. Are those fees voluntary or mandatory? How will they work? Does a company have to pay? As I said, when will all this be negotiated? If there is a natural disaster I would hope that we got on with fixing the problem and that the Government would be sufficiently robust and well resourced to do that, not that we would be quibbling about collecting these fees.
As I said, we are going into a world where there are likely to be more natural disasters. We should not shy away from that, but the Treasury would better spend its time getting to grips with climate change rather than preventing us from tackling it and introducing apparently innocuous but quite powerful bits of legislation that enable it to collect costs. It should be thinking about how it can act to stop the excessive increase of natural disasters and it should start taking climate change seriously.