Northern Ireland (Regional Rates and Energy) (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2019-03-06
Topic: Energy
Andrew William Murrison (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to you for calling me to speak in this stage of our proceedings, Sir Lindsay. The complexity of the Bill, apart from clause 1, has been demonstrated by the level of discussion that we have had. That really underscores the need for full and proper scrutiny of this Bill. Forcing this through all its stages in a day is a challenge, and I fear we have not explored sufficiently the complexity of this matter. It is a matter that bears on the lives of many people in Northern Ireland and we must get it right. I know the Secretary of State is as keen as I am to ensure that that happens I am grateful to the parliamentary draftsmen for their assistance in crafting my new clause, which is available in manuscript form. It turns what I thought would be a simple matter—that of dividing the largely uncontroversial part of the Bill from the more difficult bit on the RHI—into something that, in my mind, is really quite complicated, but that is the nature of this place and of parliamentary draftsmanship. We cannot consider these two parts separately and be sure the matter will be finalised in time for people to get their money on 1 April, so in consultation with parliamentary draftsmen, we have devised a new clause and an amendment to clause 6, which is the commencement clause I am grateful to the members of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee who have co-signed the new clause and amendment. I have appended to the new clause what I hope is a helpful explanatory statement. It explains that the new clause is essentially a patch-up job that I hope will help to facilitate consultation and fuller and better scrutiny of proposed changes to the renewable heat incentive scheme to ensure that current participants are not disadvantaged by changes to the scheme. I appreciate that this is imperfect—I would have preferred for it to be dealt with separately and for the Bill to have been divided into two parts to allow for a proper debate on the RHI clauses and schedule—but I accept that we are faced with the choice of supporting the Bill or not and that if we do not support it many people will be financially disadvantaged, which is not acceptable. I hope that the new clause provides a mechanism for scrutinising this matter, albeit imperfectly, and for making recommendations that the Secretary of State might implement to ensure that as few people as possible are disadvantaged I am not in the business of job creation, and I gently point out that my Select Committee is the most productive in the House of Commons, according to figures I have seen—we are pretty busy, particularly at the moment—but it might be thought a proper Select Committee to undertake this work. If so, I will discuss it with my Committee, but I make no prescription. I am quite clear that this complicated element of our business needs proper detailed scrutiny and that we need to see and examine the data produced Several right hon. and hon. Members have been a little critical of the Department for the Economy. It is after all implicated in this situation, as the informatics it produced and the advice it gave are partly to blame for where we are, and that means we are doubly obliged to examine closely any material it has produced. That is fair and proper scrutiny. I gently suggest that whichever Select Committee undertakes this work focus heavily on that information so that we can be clear what is being recommended to the Secretary of State and are better able to make recommendations to minimise the hard cases that we are all concerned about in the course of this legislation. I hope she will consider the amendments carefully, and I look forward to hearing what she has to say.