Draft Electricity and Gas (Powers to Make Subordinate Legislation) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Drew Hendry Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 General Committees

[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Sir David.

The Minister, with her usual aplomb, in a well-presented technical exposition of what is in front of us this morning, asked us to accept that everything will be okay if we just leave it at that. I do not intend to cover all the ground that has already been covered, and I will try to be much quicker and perhaps a little blunter in expressing my feelings about what is in front of us.

This is not just a technical matter; it represents another Henry VIII power grab, following the Brexit power grab. We have concerns about giving UK Ministers the right to amend EU energy transparency rules through the negative procedure. REMIT creates a very important framework for identifying and penalising market abuse in the UK and across Europe. That helps consumers, industry and other active participants to have confidence that wholesale energy prices are open, fair and competitive and are the foundations of an effectively functioning energy market. It is of paramount importance that those transparency rules can be changed only with full transparency. That should therefore require the positive procedure.

This is just another example of how Brexit will entail a loss of transparency and scrutiny. The proliferation of these extra bits of Brexit red tape belies a Government unprepared for Brexit. Brexit is creating more red tape, unlike what we were promised. It is totally unacceptable that Ministers expect us to hand over more powers when we have been very clear that, in our view, the powers that are already held by Ministers are not being used to benefit Scotland.

For example, nothing has been done on regulating off-grid heating oil and gas. Nothing has been done to challenge the extra unit price that people in the highlands and islands pay for their electricity. Nothing has been done, as we heard from the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) yesterday, for oil and gas in the North sea. To quote him exactly, he said:

“Exactly; we have done nothing.”—[Official Report, 31 October 2018; Vol. 648, c. 987.]

Why would we want to hand more unsupervised powers to the UK Government? I am afraid we have to reject that proposition.