It seems to me that we have got to the bottom of this. It is a very narrow thing that is needed, yet the Government have created an incredibly enabling piece of legislation with no scrutiny. It is poor legislative drafting to have taken such a wide-ranging power. The Minister says that it will not apply to electricity, or will be used only in certain circumstances—which boils down to the Army learning how to drive fuel tankers. That is very narrow, but this is not a narrow provision. It almost sounds as if one could interpret this as the Government going into the energy supply business. It is that broad. I am glad and encouraged that we are not. I am also reassured to hear that this is discretionary, although how that would play out I am not sure. Either you deploy or you do not deploy.
Is the Minister saying that we would not deploy unless the company agreed to pay? That would be a reduction in the security of the country. The company might say, “No, we’re not paying for that”. Who in their right mind would say yes? If you are an oil
company, you will not have factored into your bottom line unexpected payments to the Government for people to drive your tankers. The money has to be recouped from somewhere, and a company would be perfectly within its rights to refuse to pay. In that case, the Government will have to deploy their personnel anyway, or risk an interruption in our fuel supply. This needs to be narrowed in its application. It needs more definition in law.
I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Roper, who pointed to the delegated powers recommendation that subsection (3)(b) does not deserve to be here. It is
far too wide-ranging. The whole thing is ill conceived. As I pointed out, in a disaster situation the last thing you want to be doing is negotiating around who is paying who. We have a Government. We pay taxes for a reason. That is what we expect of government. This is penny-pinching from the Treasury and it does not deserve to be in the Bill.