I very much welcome the words of my noble friend at the end of his remarks. They were most encouraging and I am sure will be welcomed by the industry. I hope that what he said about retaining the discretion to make changes can be further clarified in due course because the way that he explained it, as my noble friend Lord Teverson pointed out, could continue the fear in the hearts of the industry.
Surely the discretion to change must be about new schemes or future projects—for example, changes to the feed-in tariff related to new schemes; changes to the renewables obligation going from one ROC to 0.9 ROC were about new projects that would be commissioned after a particular date. Just to be clear, we are talking here about projects that will have been
invested in, commissioned and generating before 2017. It must all happen before March 2017, unless such projects at the margin are eligible for the discretionary arrangements to which the noble Baroness referred.
That is the strong clarification that I would like to receive in terms of why this discretion is necessary. If I do not get that changed, I will continue to make the analogy with Spain, which was where the panic was created—and not just there but globally throughout the renewables sector. If any Government said, “We are committed to renewables but, by the way, this project that you invested in last year, where you committed funding and had bank commitments in place, is now going to be subject to a change in government support”, that is very bad news. If that were a possibility in terms of the grandfathering rights, they would not be grandfathering rights at all. It is as simple as that. However, on the basis of the strong reassurances that I received from the Minister at the end of his remarks, which I very much welcome, I am prepared to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.