Renewable Energy

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord will understand that the spending review is of course a matter for the Treasury and that I cannot comment ahead of its decisions. However, we are prioritising investment in the renewables sector. We are accelerating new capacity through the contracts for difference scheme, which gives us certainty to drive private sector investment and has been very successful in driving down costs.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

I am grateful to the Minister for that Answer. Do the Government have any plans to go above the 65% renewables target in this NIC report? Secondly—[Inaudible]—the Government not to build any more nuclear power stations. Based on Hinkley Point’s mushrooming costs, which are even higher than HS2’s, they would do better to carry on with more renewables, as the report shows that their costs are coming down significantly.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I think I caught most of that question. The noble Lord is correct that renewables such as wind and solar are now some of the cheapest forms of generation per unit. These technologies are key to meeting net zero but will need to be complemented by other sources of power, including nuclear, which are available when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.

Trade Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to introduce the House in this debate to the Luxembourg Rail Protocol, which needs a minor amendment to the Trade Bill. It would enable the Government to move forward with ratification, which would help rail operators and manufacturers encourage foreign investment into the UK and support UK exports of rail equipment. It mirrors something which has existed for some years in the air sector, and it is caused by a problem of getting finance for things that move and can be taken away.

To introduce it very quickly, the Luxembourg Rail Protocol to the Cape Town convention is an international treaty which will make it easier and cheaper for the private sector to finance all types of railway rolling stock, from locomotives to passenger and freight wagons, metro trains and trams, and so on. I believe from earlier discussions that it has government and cross-party support, and it needs a statutory instrument, as long as that is authorised by primary legislation. The protocol to the Cape Town convention creates a new global system for protecting and prioritising creditor rights in relation to secured financing or leasing of all types of rolling stock. This includes a facility to register security interests in an international registry, and it is the first common global system for uniquely identifying rail equipment. As noble Lords will know, rail equipment, like aircraft, has a habit of being moved if it is in the owner’s interest to do so.

It reduces creditor risk, the legal cost of financing and the cost of capital, and will relieve central and local government of the burden of financing or underwriting the procurement of new rail equipment. It will also provide the opportunity for government to refinance cost-effectively existing equipment. Of course, for exporters of rail equipment, which we hope will continue and grow after Brexit, the treaty will make manufacturers more competitive, particularly by levelling the playing field against Chinese competition, which many industries fear quite a lot. It will create valuable new markets and facilitate lower risks.

As I said, the UK has already adopted the Cape Town convention’s protocol applying to aircraft. It has signed but not ratified the rail protocol. Post Covid, this is all very important, so I propose to put down a few small amendments to Clause 2 to allow this convention to be ratified within the wider definition of the implementation of international trade agreements.

Post Office: Horizon Accounting System

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I have spoken to the chief executive of the Post Office, as has my ministerial colleague who is responsible for this matter. We are conveying the strongest possible message that the Post Office of course needs to have a strong and robust relationship with its sub-postmasters.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to be here; I thought I might have to be scratched as my train was late. The Minister has said that there was a substantial award against the Post Office, but every noble Lord who has spoken has pointed out that most of that went on legal fees. Is it not the duty of the Government to properly compensate the people who have incurred this loss?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I am pleased that the noble Lord’s train was not late. I understand the frustration expressed by noble Lords. When I first saw the award, I shared some of that frustration, but that was the process and that was the judicial outcome. There is a separate historical shortfall scheme, which the Post Office is following. We believe that this is the appropriate way for compensation to be awarded.

Competition and Markets Authority

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Berkeley]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to ensure that the interests of (1) consumers, and (2) businesses, in the United Kingdom, are independently and fairly looked after following the resignation of the Chairman of the Competition and Markets Authority.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are committed to ensuring that markets work well for consumers and businesses and have already ensured that the Competition and Markets Authority has significant powers to investigate and act if it finds that companies are behaving anti-competitively in a market. The CMA will continue to carry out its important functions. We will announce next steps on recruitment for a new chair in due course.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer. Does he agree that, for the CMA to do its job properly and enable business to plan in relation to Brexit, the Government must have a robust, updated and properly structured competition policy? I heard what he said, but how will this be achieved? On the latest information I have, the CMA responded with a comprehensive plan on 21 February 2019. Since then, there has been nothing until a letter to the chair of the EU Select Committee arrived at 11.02 this morning; I declare an interest as a member of its sub-committee. Will the Government urgently introduce legislation on competition policies to support consumers in the UK and UK business?

Post Office: Horizon Accounting System

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2020 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Berkeley]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they intend to take in response to the judgment in Bates v Post Office [2019] EWHC 3408; and whether they intend to take any action against the directors responsible for the Horizon Accounting System.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to have secured this debate. It comes only a couple of weeks after a very useful Starred Question from the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, who has been working on this campaign for years. Good luck to him. I also pay tribute to the journalist Nick Wallis and Private Eye, who have been keeping this issue going. It is a 10-year campaign for justice by hundreds of sub-postmasters who have been really badly treated by the Post Office.

I will concentrate on how those who have suffered will be compensated and what action, if any, will be taken against the perpetrators. Noble Lords will know that the number of personal tragedies has grown over the years. I will quote just one about Mr Gary Brown from Rawcliffe in Yorkshire, who produced a very long and sad description of what happened. After several years of the Horizon system charging him for what he did not owe, he ended up with a till £32,000 short, which, for a small trader, is appalling. The computer said that he was short, so what did he do? He called the auditors. The Post Office interviewed him and searched his house. In the end, he had to sell his house and he was desolate, all because Royal Mail refused to believe that its Horizon system was faulty.

Luckily, Mr Brown and others suddenly discovered they were not alone. He was among hundreds of sub-postmasters from the 11,000-odd branches who were suffering from these accounting discrepancies. Many complained that they were not to blame and that the Horizon system was at fault. Many were accused of stealing money. That is a really serious accusation for a small business. Some had to pay the Post Office tens of thousands of pounds and many lost their businesses, but they formed this group of 500-odd sub-postmasters to take forward a campaign, which culminated in a judgment last December, which we have talked about before but we need to talk about again.

The judgment is against the Post Office and has some pretty horrible comments about Fujitsu. Mr Justice Fraser saved some of his harshest words for Fujitsu, which runs Horizon. To quote Private Eye, he found that

“‘on too many occasions’ Fujitsu personnel knowingly entered incorrect codes when closing enquiries, blaming ‘user error’ when they had already concluded this wasn’t the case.”

That is a criminal thing to do to these small businesses.

It is worth quoting some of Mr Justice Fraser’s judgment. He said:

“The approach by the Post Office to the evidence of someone such as Mr Latif demonstrates a simple institutional obstinacy or refusal to consider any possible alternatives to their view of Horizon, which was maintained regardless of the weight of factual evidence to the contrary.”


This went on for a year, when the Post Office tried to get Mr Justice Fraser removed because he did not agree with it—it is wonderful to get rid of a judge if you do not like him. He concluded:

“This approach by the Post Office has amounted, in reality, to bare assertions and denials that ignore what has actually occurred … It amounts to the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat.”


That is a pretty strong judgment. After many attempts, the Post Office finally had to give up and accept that this was the answer.

So who is to blame, and what next? The Post Office is managed by BEIS, and one has to ask who was on watch over these 10 years. We started off with the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, and then it was Vince Cable, then Sajid Javid and of course there were many junior Ministers—I will not read out a long list of them. But what did they do about their company on our behalf, which was abusing its position and defrauding perhaps 10,000 postmasters of their health and livelihood?

I have not found any serious apologies for this yet. When we discussed this in a Starred Question on 4 February, the noble Lord, Lord Duncan, apologised and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, also mentioned that she had been a Minister. They were genuine, but who was running the Post Office then? It was Adam Crozier from 2003 to 2010. Moya Greene took over and split the Post Office and the Royal Mail and then Paula Vennells was in charge from 2012 to 2019. She was quoted in some of the Government’s public relations papers as the chief executive who took the Post Office from a £120 million loss to breaking even. According to the Daily Mail, she was paid £3.7 million in six years. But, more importantly, she was presiding over a company that tried every means at its disposal to deny, obfuscate and challenge in court any attempt by the sub-postmasters to get an independent inquiry into the failures of the IT system and compensation, which is pretty rich. Of course, as ever, because she then left, she has been promoted to run something in the health service.

The judge found against the Post Office on all counts and awarded the postmasters £58 million, but it was quite clear that most of that will go on legal costs. How can you achieve £58 million in legal costs? Of course you had a Post Office that kept on challenging things. Fujitsu also behaved in a manner that might be seen to be criminal or dishonest—I do not know—but it is a question that needs to be answered. Maybe there should be an independent public inquiry. That is the only answer.

So what will the Government do to provide some proper compensation to the victims of the failure—it may be fraud and greed—of the company that we as taxpayers are supposed to own? It is easier to spin out legal processes for years and avoid blaming anyone in the Post Office, officials, Ministers and so forth, but should there be a public inquiry? Should there be action against Fujitsu over Horizon? I do not know. But the postmasters, who reasonably believed that the Government and their company—our company—would behave in an open, honest and transparent way, have been very badly let down. They deserve urgent and generous compensation.

I welcome the helpful remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Duncan, the other day as far as they went, and I hope that our new Minister will be equally helpful and supportive of an urgent resolution. But there is also a need for the Government and Parliament to review how senior people, who clearly failed and brought their companies into disrepute, are moved and promoted, while those whom they destroyed are left to suffer with nowhere to go.

I have one last thought. Ten years ago, the Royal Mail included the Post Office, which now issues stamps with the Queen’s head on them, so one might expect the Queen and other members of the Royal Family to feel some attachment to the Post Office. As noble Lords know, I have had some questions about royal and Duchy finances, but I have never had cause to question their business ethics or employment practices—and I would not. But we can be sure that they would never stoop to such appalling treatment of their lowest paid staff as forcing them into penury or worse as their Government have done. This should have been the approach of Ministers and directors of the Post Office. They failed miserably and we must make amends. The Government must make amends and compensate all those affected.

Carbon Budgets

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 8th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

The noble Baroness ought to look at the success of offshore wind. I am trying to remember how many years we have to go back to see how the price of that has come down. The opportunities for the price of offshore wind coming down are surely far greater than for onshore wind, because of the scale of the windmills that one can build at sea, compared to on land. We have no plans to review that policy.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister has already mentioned shipping, but what about air services? Air and shipping together must be the most polluting forms of transport in the world. I know they are international, but is it not about time we included both within these targets?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, we do include them in the targets, as I made clear, but emissions from domestic flights and shipping are covered by domestic legislation. The Committee on Climate Change accounts for international flights and shipping in its advice setting out our interim carbon budgets, and this will continue for the more ambitious targets ahead.

Renewable Energy

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, on securing this debate, because the subject has always been of great interest to me. It must have been nearly 50 years ago, when I was a young engineer, that I worked on the Severn barrage project. It was in the days when big projects were great fun. We built the Thames barrier—I did not build it, but others did—big airports in the middle of the countryside and the Severn barrage. I remember people at the time saying, “We might need 500 million tonnes of rock, but we can knock down a few Welsh hillsides and put them in the sea; that will be all right”. Somehow, we have to build a piece of concrete, presumably, that will take all the turbines that the noble Lord mentioned—he is quite right—get them out there and sink them as a big caissons, a bit like the D-day ones 20 or 30 years on. We will have a nice road and railway across the middle and that will be fine.

As the noble Lord said, the benefit of tidal power is that you can predict when the tides will flow. We looked at Morecambe Bay and the Severn and found that, because there was a difference of three hours between the tides—there is always a difference of three hours, I am told—we could get a consistent output of power, presumably with suitable connections between the two. We are a long way from that but you can predict it, which makes it very different from wind turbines, which have a really good place in our energy mix now but you cannot predict them as well. So I am a great believer in tidal generation. Where I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, is that I think the technology, as many noble Lords have said, has moved forward to underwater turbines, either fixed to the seabed or on pontoons. The Devon and Cornwall local enterprise partnership is looking at pontoons for putting a windmill in the air and turbines underneath, moored offshore. That seems the best of both worlds and a technology we should be looking at to harness the tides. We must harness them.

Many noble Lords have talked about good locations and there are many of them. I am sure it can be done. My worry about barrages goes back to my time spent looking at this project. We ended up getting worried about quite a few things. In the Severn, birds are obviously very important—not just at Slimbridge but in quite a few other places. They are in other places, too. Silting would be a serious problem in the Severn, not just if there were a barrage across the middle, but even if it were something like that at Swansea Bay. You can never tell, without doing a great deal of work, how much the silting will change. Will it get better or worse, and how much maintenance dredging would you have to do if you wanted to keep shipping? Of course, the Port of Bristol has always been very much against the Severn barrage, as noble Lords will understand, for very good reasons.

There was also a proposal, I think, as part of Boris Johnson’s idea of building an airport in the Thames estuary, to put a bridge or a dam across the Thames, not only to be able to get across by road or rail but also to generate electricity. The tidal range is much less on the Thames than on the Severn, but the silting problem would have been just as bad, and it is bad enough there anyway. What not everybody seems to appreciate is that you have to find all the rock—it is mostly rock, I think—to build such barrages. To take the example of Swansea Bay that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, mentioned briefly, one proposal was to get the rock from the east side of the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, where I live, from an old quarry. All the rock would have gone out by sea, quite a few jobs would have been created locally and there would have been very little extra traffic. The environmental fuss that was made, rightly or wrongly, about taking a comparatively small amount of rock to build this, compared with going all the way across the Severn, was quite surprising to me.

We have to recognise that, in the state we are in now, when we are all very good at protesting at things and opposing things—I am quite good at that myself sometimes—we have to think about the best way of avoiding too much disruption. I suspect that with something like the Severn barrage or Morecambe Bay, you would end up getting the rock from somewhere like Sweden or Norway, or perhaps the Outer Hebrides, with lots of rock to ship. We may have moved on and I hope we can therefore direct more attention to the new technologies, as I call them, of underwater turbines, than we do at the moment. I know that the La Rance barrage in France works well, but that was built a long time ago. It may be therefore that the technology of barrages is being overtaken by the technology of underwater turbines, such as those on board barges or on the seabed.

The noble Lord said that once one is built, there is no maintenance. I slightly disagree with him there. Turbines, whether in barrages or on the seabed, need maintenance. The sea is a pretty hostile environment and there is not much you can do about that. You have to find a way of maintaining them easily, whether off a barge, a roadway or whatever. The way that the offshore industry—not just oil but windmills as well—has taken the technology forward will mean that that will get easier and therefore cheaper in the future. But it still needs doing.

The addition from the barrage point of view was mainly the cost of dredging. If you are trying to keep a shipping lane open or dealing with the changes that happen when the tide comes in and out or goes around, it will need dredging. We have all read about the River Nile and the Aswan Dam, which is completely different because it brings silt down from the middle of Africa. It may have seemed a wonderful scheme 50 years ago, but now it is almost full of silt. The same could happen in the Bristol Channel and in many other rivers. There is a great deal of silt in there and one never knows quite what will happen to the silt and how it will affect it.

I support the need to get much more energy for our country out of tidal movement. There are many places where we could do it; we should be encouraging the research and development of things that sit on the seabed, on barges or wherever they may be. I have a friend who has been dealing with the trials on the Pentland Firth. Amazingly, he has only a 15-minute window during which he can drop things on the seabed before the tide starts rushing in the other direction. They are doing it, so it works—it just needs a bit more development. I would therefore argue against any more lagoons of any size, which will cause more problems in the future. Together, I hope we can get the sum total of a great deal more tidal energy than we have at the moment.

Competition (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, unlike my noble friend Lord Kirkwood, I have not sat on the scrutiny committee so some of my questions may appear a trifle naive to more learned Members, for which I apologise in advance. I ask the Minister to bear with me.

The regulations address deficiencies in competition legislation arising from our exit from the EU. As I understand it, we will no longer be part of the EU competition system. Can the Minister say how this is likely to affect our ability to tender for EU contracts? Currently we do very well in tendering for and obtaining EU contracts. Am I correct in supposing that we will lose our ability to tender for EU contracts? If so, what estimate have the Government made of the loss of value that this will have on the UK economy? Perhaps the Minister can help me; there is no impact assessment because, according to the text, the SI is supposed to have no effect on private businesses and charities.

The regulations come into force on exit day. But when, if ever, will exit day be? Unless the very worst happens, presumably it will not be 29 March 2019. We understand that we are not going to crash out—that is not going to be allowed—but, on the legal information to which we have not been privy and on which they are voting right now in the other place, presumably exit day could be years away, if ever. The only way that the British people can know is to have a say on the deal that Mrs May has negotiated and vote to end the madness and remain.

We have the advice of the chief legal adviser to the EU that we could pull out of Brexit with no penalty right now. I appreciate that if Brexit continues to prevail, we have to have a plan. Having retained much existing EU law, we have to pick through the bits of legislation which will not apply or which are unlikely to work once we have left. These regulations relate to inconsistencies in competition law in the event of the worst possible piece of self-harm that the British people have done for generations—a no-deal Brexit.

The regulations relate to infringements of and exemptions from competition and merger law. Part 2 of the regulations is “Amendment of the Competition Act 1998”. Part 3 is “Amendment of the Enterprise Act 2002”. Part 4 is “Amendment of other primary legislation”. Part 5 is “Amendment of subordinate legislation”. Part 6 relates to amending and revoking retained EU law, and part 7 is “Saving and transitional provision”.

I am no legal expert, as I am sure has already become apparent to noble Lords, but the fact that no impact assessment has been produced because no significant impact on the voluntary or private sector is foreseen suggests to me that it is hoped that this is merely a tidying-up exercise. It may be technical, but I still fail to see why there is no impact assessment on what impact this competition crisis will have on our ability to trade and compete with our biggest market, indeed, the biggest single market in the world.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, my understanding is that these draft regulations will apply only if we crash out or similar with no deal at the end of March next year. As the noble Baroness said, there are some interesting questions, to which we need answers.

I should like to get some answers from the Minister about what happens to some of the cases that are being considered at present by either the CMA or the European Commission competition authorities. Such cases run for years. They may have started now, but they certainly will not finish. Presumably anything that starts before 29 March next year will continue to some conclusion by the competition authority in the Commission. Is there a time limit on that? How will the relationships between the UK parties, if you like, and the Commission and the other parties be handled in that transition period, which may go on for a great deal longer than any transition that the Prime Minister may be negotiating? Some of these competition cases go on for years.

One case I have got slightly involved in watching is between two railway manufacturing companies, Siemens and Alstom. Siemens has its head office in Germany and Alstom has its head office in France, I think. They have been proposing a merger of all their businesses for several years now. The European Commission has got to the stage of issuing something that is not technically an opinion, but seems to me to be an opinion, which suggests that a merger would be a bad idea for competition across Europe in the whole railway sector. The companies appear to have been trying to promote the merger as a way of preventing Chinese industries taking over everything in Europe, including the UK. Both companies have subsidiaries in the UK; some make trains, some make signalling and some do other things. If that merger went ahead on the continent—in Europe—could the CMA stop a merger between their subsidiaries in this country, or vice versa? How would it work? If they wanted to merge in this country, would the CMA’s decision apply in Europe?

Presumably, if any of this is to work at all, there has to be some communication between the CMA and the European Commission’s competition department on issues such as this. I would welcome a comment from the Minister as to how that conversation—it may be only a conversation—would happen and the extent to which a decision by one party would be binding on the other. I look forward to his comments.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for letting me have a letter before this debate; it came in good time and was correctly addressed. I am sure he will be delighted to know that our discussion across the Dispatch Box in the Moses Room on our previous SI has borne perfect fruit, and I have enjoyed being able to get myself up to speed before dealing with the matter at hand.

I am looking forward to the Minister’s comments on the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley. Between them, they have exposed some of the difficulties with this SI. Although there is very little that one would object to in what it tries to set out, it raises a number of doubts and concerns about the process that has been going on which are not entirely related to Brexit. Many of the SIs that we are seeing under the general heading of “EU exit regulations” are effectively cut-and-paste, substituting “UK and its institutions and authorities” for “EU”. But in a case such as this, which, as my noble friend says, could go on for years and may have to be transferred across and dealt with under joint arrangements, there is material that is subject to fine investigation and discussion. It affects thousands of consumers in many countries and many areas, and there are difficulties in trying to calibrate that effectively. It is not quite the same as the general ones. I just wanted to make that point.

There are general questions here as well as specific ones about the documentation, and I will cover both sets of questions as I go through it. My main concern relates to paragraphs 7.3 and 7.4 of the Explanatory Memorandum, which is otherwise very good and very clear. I thank the officials for their work on it. We miss impact statements, which are often a source of much more information about the issues before us, but in their absence the Explanatory Memorandum is very good. The first and main point here is the Government’s decision—there are other ways of dealing with this issue—to repeal Section 60 of the Competition Act, which provides that, as far as possible, the CMA and UK courts must interpret UK competition law in a manner consistent with EU competition law. There is a straightforward issue here about whether that would be appropriate in a no-deal Brexit situation. The Government could have had a number of options here, one of which would have been to be more generous in terms of the wish to see the best jurisprudence brought to bear on any cases that might be in front of the CMA. They could choose not to disallow the interpretive obligation but take it as appropriate, or some other wording. That would have been a way of ensuring that the best decisions were reached even though it might transgress a red line on the role of the courts in the EU post a no-deal Brexit.

If that is the issue, have the Government got it right by repealing Section 60 and bringing forward a modified section, Section 60A, to replace it, which provides in some detail that the competition regulators and the UK courts will continue to be bound by an obligation to ensure that there is no inconsistency with pre-exit EU competition case law but makes it impossible to bring in any jurisprudence that takes place afterwards except in limited circumstances? I am sure that Ministers have thought about this carefully and I would be grateful if the Minister would share with us a little of that thinking. It seems to me that, in an attempt to give expression to the red-line areas, they are causing what might turn out to be a legal—I am trying to think of the appropriate word—

[Lord Berkeley]

Minefield?

Nuclear Sector Deal

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

It seems the House would like the noble Lord to be working there; whether he wants to is a matter for him and his family.

As I said in response to my noble friend’s question about the same site, I am not fully up to scratch on this and it would probably be better if I wrote to the noble Lord with further details. As I said in the Statement, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State is there, as is my colleague, Richard Harrington.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister welcomed the various technologies being proposed for future nuclear, but is he aware that the technology being used at Hinkley Point is a French one that is not approved, for safety reasons, in the power stations they are building in France or in Finland? He mentioned the cost of electricity in relation to Swansea Bay, but the cost to the consumer of Hinkley Point will, I believe, be one of the highest of any production we have in this country. Can he make sure that the technology for all these proposed future nuclear stations is proven before massive amounts of money are spent?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, we have started on Hinkley—that is going ahead and I am satisfied, as is the department, that it is safe. The strike price there was on the high side, but the cost of other proposals being recommended by the Liberal Party—for example, Swansea Bay—are considerably higher and it is right that we look at something of lower cost. We are looking—I cannot speculate on what figures we will get to—to get lower prices for the site at Wylfa in Anglesey. We will continue to do this and that is why we want to go on seeing that 30% reduction in new-build costs between now and 2030. That is what the sector deal is all about.

Oil and Gas: UK Continental Shelf

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

The noble Baroness makes a point but it is important that we continue to look at all available resources. The noble Baroness knows we are moving towards a low-carbon economy but we also want a balanced energy mix. It is important that we make use in the medium—and possibly long—term of the fossil fuels that we have.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, who is responsible for removing the redundant platforms in the North Sea and elsewhere? I believe they are all privately owned. What happens if the company no longer exists? Who is responsible for putting the seabed and everything else back to what it was originally?