My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have spoken on this. I am certainly gratified to hear from the Minister how much effort and concern the department has put into the question of gas supply. However, we were more concerned about price security than about supply security. That is the important point to emphasise. The Minister said that she thought that additional powers were not necessary to achieve this, but I am not entirely clear from what she said whether that is the case.
In effect, we are proposing a mechanism by which the private sector can come to the Government and say, “Look, we can guarantee a certain amount of gas at a particular price over a particular period”. That would in fact be achieved by gas storage, but I do not think that the Government need to get involved in it; all that they need to do is make a deal with a company or group of companies to supply gas in particular quantities at particular times. That is why the capacity mechanism or the CFD mechanism would be extremely useful. I am not clear that the Minister has the power to use those mechanisms under the legislation as it is currently drafted, which is why I tabled this amendment.
A practical amendment could be extremely simple—probably much simpler than this one. If the Minister is concerned about the resource needed in DECC to draft an amendment properly, I have no doubt that industry would be willing to make legal help available to work under DECC officials to draft something acceptable. I am not entirely sure that the assurances that she gave me were quite relevant to this case but, that said, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.