My Lords, I do not have a great deal to add and obviously we do not oppose these regulations, but it seems that they have come forward urgently because the department appeared to forget, when making the original regulations, that—as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said—there is no complete register of heat suppliers in place that would enable the original legislation to be properly carried out. The original legislation went through without a word about why the department did not know who the energy suppliers were and how that made the legislation somewhat redundant and difficult to implement.
It seems that we have in front of us a rapid and somewhat scrambled fix to try to rectify that original problem. No doubt the Minister will tell me that I am wrong, but it seems to exist because the department forgot that a rather central part of the method of getting money to customers is through heat suppliers, which should be known to the department to make them pass the money through. Why is the scheme so last-minute and retrospective? Should it not have been up and running and operating earlier so that customers could benefit?
The Explanatory Memorandum for this SI says that this must happen in order to get money to customers over the winter period, so my question to the Minister is: how has this happened? Why have the regulations been introduced suddenly, and why now when this should have been done earlier? How much time has been lost in getting money to customers as a result of the scheme being incomplete when it was introduced? Finally, have customers lost out or been disadvantaged in any way? That is probably the key point, because people are getting much higher bills than they would have expected a year or 18 months ago. Judging from my experience, although I am not struggling to pay, people are being shocked and taken aback.
I looked at the Explanatory Memorandum and it seemed there were one or two errors. The instrument makes corrections to definitions of “end-user”,
“intermediary” and “scheme benefit”. That seems glaring. The Explanatory Memorandum says that suppliers need
“more time to provide their customers with detailed calculations”.
I would have thought that that problem could have been anticipated and dealt with earlier. That is a concern. I also spotted, in the “policy background” section that
“The heat network sector is not currently comprehensively regulated and there exists no complete record of heat suppliers.”
This is quite revealing. I appreciate that the instrument attempts to address this, but it is something of a gap to have left in the first instance. Although I was sort of impressed by the consultation exercise, a workshop with 120 heat suppliers in October hardly seems a complete consultation to my way of thinking. In its section on impact, the Explanatory Memorandum also refers to “light-touch notification”, so that heat suppliers
“in effect are given an extension on the deadline for making the much more comprehensive notification under the”
billing regulations.
I may have misunderstood this, but I do not think I have. By my way of reading it, it is not an entirely happy story. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s explanation of why and how this came about.