Clause 8
Energy Bill
2:00 pm
Charles Hendry (Shadow Minister, Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform; Wealden, Conservative)
In general we are happy with the clause but would like a little clarification from the Minister on the phrase “ought to know” in subsection (4), line 17 on page 5:
“It is an offence for a person to fail to disclose information which the person knows, or ought to know, to be relevant to an application”.
That sounds like the sort of language that I use towards my children, when I say “you ought to have known that if you didn’t eat your lunch, you wouldn’t be getting a chocolate bar in the afternoon” or “you shouldn’t have got up in the middle of the night and played on your PlayStation”. I do not know the legal groundings of it; it sounds vaguely Rumsfeldian—there are the things that we know that we know, the things that we know that we do not know and the things that we do not know that we know. When one introduces to that the things that we know that we ought to know that we do not know and the things that we do not know that we ought to know, it becomes a recipe for chaos. I will be grateful if the Minister can give us further guidance and clarification about the legal definition of those few words.