Clause 46
Energy Bill
4:00 pm
Steve Webb (Chair of the Election Manifesto Group, Cross-Portfolio and Non-Portfolio Responsibilities; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
I have just a brief question in response to the Minister’s comments. We are in the strange situation of deciding that although clause 45 has decent provisions and sets out how things should be done, clause 46 states that the Secretary of State does not have to do any of that if he does not want to.
When I first read that, I imagined that it was an emergency provision—something changes which means that it is important that the funded decommissioning plan is suddenly changed. I can understand why we would then disapply the careful safeguards set out in the previous clause, but the Secretary of State—I mean the Minister; I am getting ahead of myself—is saying the opposite, in that the proposal is de minimis and these are piddling, if I may use that word, little changes. He says that the Government do not want big paraphernalia because they are only changing small things, but that is not remotely apparent from reading clause 46.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham will try to catch your eye, Mrs. Humble, to raise slightly separate issues, but my worry is that the proposal is so vague and all-embracing that, essentially, we have agreed a set of procedures that seemed reasonable in clause 45, but we are now giving the Secretary of State carte blanch to rip them all up—albeit after consultation—on unspecified grounds which may be specified later. It seems so sweeping. Will the Minister reflect on whether the power is too broad and will rip up what we have just agreed to? The clause might say that it is to be used only in cases in which the regulatory burden of applying clause 45 is excessive and so on, but we do not even have any clues on that. I think that clause 46 is far too broadly drawn.