My Lords, I wish to add my voice to some of the points that have been made this afternoon. I particularly want to talk about parliamentary process. I have done this before. For the duration of the coalition Government, I was a party Whip and I am still a party Whip. We have never had to deal with the situation that we had with this Bill where we had the Second Reading on the last day of business. We had the first day of Committee when we came back for two weeks. We then went away for two weeks. We were promised that we would have the amendments to the Bill on 7 October. We got them on 8 October. They were several pages of very technical amendments.
I feel a great deal of sympathy for the Minister because it is probably not his fault that this has happened. But to have to deal with this Bill in this way? This is his first Energy Bill and I have a great of sympathy for him, so I am not necessarily having a go at the Minister, but at the process. We really need to get our act together.
We have heard today about how this is affecting people outside; about how important it is and how people want to talk to us. I made the point before that we are now a very big House. If we make technical changes like these at the very last minute, it is very difficult for Back-Benchers to get involved. A lot of us get bombarded by people from outside who are worried about what is going on, and what time have we had to deal with that? I would like to send the message—I am very pleased the government Chief Whip is in his place—that we try to avoid this in the future. It is not a good, efficient way to work and it is not the way the House of Lords has worked in the past.
The other point that I want to support is the issue of certainty. In the last Parliament, we had the promise made by the noble Baroness, Lady Verma—I was there, working on that Bill. We again spent hours on technical stuff, going through an Energy Bill, trying to make sure that in the future people who invest in
energy across the board would have certainty about what was happening. We are already into the uncertainty around this Bill. I read with horror in one of the newspapers—I am afraid I cannot find the article again—that the funding for one of the gas turbines had been withdrawn because of the uncertainty about what the Government were doing in the whole of the energy sector. This is an important point that the noble Lords, Lord Deben and Lord Foulkes, have also talked about.
We are where we are and the uncertainty is very difficult for industry. We have heard about businesses going under and so on. We are between a rock and a hard place on these Benches because in some ways we do not particularly like the way in which the Government have carried on, but we want to try to make sure that the amendments are as good as we can get them. My noble and learned friend, Lord Wallace, is much more able than I am and has explained them all beautifully to the Committee. I hope that the Government can respond to these, because it is important that the uncertainty does not go on any longer if we can possibly help it. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Deben, had a wonderful phrase for the things that we are trying to sort out—examples falling the wrong side of the lines. I think that is the sort of thing that we are trying to put right. I hope that between us we can reach a reasonable conclusion and we do not have uncertainty any longer in this industry.