Clause 30
Energy Bill
4:30 pm
Charles Hendry (Shadow Minister, Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform; Wealden, Conservative)
I am glad to have the opportunity to raise a couple of additional questions.
Clause 30 talks about the circumstances in which a licence may be terminated. Would the Minister clarify the circumstances? Would he give us examples of what he has in mind? Operators need to have that level of guidance, given that they are to invest tens of millions of pounds in these facilities. They need to know in what circumstances the licence could be removed from them. We are not looking for an exhaustive list but some indication of the level of offence that would result in such a draconian step.
The Minister said earlier that one did not include the obvious in the Bill; one only included the unusual and less obvious. The challenge to him is to come up with a range of less obvious activities and offences that might require the licence to be revoked in these ways. It would be important for those being asked to invest to have greater clarity.
What about compensation where a licence is withdrawn? Licences could be withdrawn because a new technology comes forward which gets rid of CO2 in a different way—maybe a science which we do not yet understand. The hon. Member for Bolton, South-East may say it is impossible that this might be developed, based on his own scientific knowledge but, on the grounds that we should not rule things out, it could be that a day will come when the Government deem that capture and storage is no longer the appropriate way to deal with CO2.In such circumstances would it not be right for operators to be entitled to compensation where they have invested millions of pounds in good faith but the Government have changed their policy for dealing with CO2?