Part of Energy Bill [HL] - Committee (1st Day) – in the House of Lords at 6:15 pm on 5 September 2022.
I am happy to provide the reassurance that the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, asks for. It was simply a matter where, originally, we intended to take a power to do this through secondary legislation but, as we got to a later stage of drafting on the Bill, we thought that it would be more appropriate to put it in primary legislation. That is normally something that the House asks us to do. We were, on this occasion, trying to pre-empt some of the points that may be made by Peers to say that we should not do so much under powers and secondary legislation and should put it in the Bill—that is in fact what we are doing.
With regard to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on resourcing, it is very early days—we have not even set up the regulator yet—so I cannot give him any specific figures on what resourcing the regulator will have. The Treasury will no doubt want to have considerable input into this, but we will want to make sure that it is appropriately resourced and that we have the appropriate technical abilities, technical inspectors and so on to make sure that this activity is appropriately licensed and enforced and, of course, is safe for operators, personnel and the public.
Amendment 33 agreed.