Electricity and Gas Transmission (Compensation) Bill

(6) Before laying the report the Secretary of State must consult such persons as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.”

Amendment 5, in title, line 1, leave out from beginning to end of line 4 and insert—

“Require proposals to be drawn up for the use of alternative dispute resolution processes to determine the compensation payable to landowners in certain cases where land is acquired for the purposes of electricity transmission.”

I have a few brief questions to ask the Minister to ensure complete clarity. Will he give an assurance that the Bill will apply to current, ongoing disputes that are not settled at the point of commencement of the Act? We are not asking for retrospection, which is a legal principle that I generally find to be abhorrent, but for cases that are not concluded when the legislation comes into effect. Will the Minister give us an update on the intended timescale for the completion of the Government scheme after the commencement of the Act? In other words, how long will it be before our constituents will see the applicability of the points that I have raised? Finally, does the Bill apply to Scotland, and in what circumstances? Those are my last remaining unresolved—or perhaps unclear—questions.

I am extremely grateful to the Minister and his team for getting clarity, and a Bill that is widely accepted in the House as necessary and in a form that the House can accept.

As I said, the network needs to be transformed at an unprecedented scale and pace, and it needs to accommodate an expected doubling in overall electricity demand by 2050, as we electrify sectors including transport, heat and industry. In order to achieve that, we committed in the British energy security strategy to accelerate the timescale for delivering new onshore transmission network infrastructure.

We recognise that in cases where land or land rights have been acquired and a settlement is not agreed between landowners and the transmission owner, challenging that via the upper tribunal can be expensive—a point made strongly by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset. The Bill presents an opportunity to address the issue by ensuring access to alternative dispute resolution processes, which can play such a crucial role in offering a quicker and more affordable route to the resolution of disputes.

We believe that the Bill can support the transformation needed so that we can have clean, secure and resilient energy for the Great British people. Landowners should have access to a clear, fair, affordable and enforceable system for dispute resolution, and I am pleased to say that we have worked closely with my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset since Second Reading and support his amendments.

I will now touch on those amendments, which I encourage the Committee to accept. Amendment 1 will remove clause 1, which will be replaced by new clause 1. The new clause focuses the proposals on electricity-related cases rather than gas-related cases. We support that change, as the examples raised by my right hon. Friend have related only to electricity network infrastructure and we are not aware of issues for gas infrastructure. It seems too early to include gas infrastructure definitively. However, the Secretary of State has the option to expand the scope if needed. Hon. Members have raised this issue in previous stages.

The new clause moves from establishing a new mechanism to encouraging the use of alternative dispute resolution processes instead of immediately resorting to the upper tribunal. It means that we can therefore consider existing practices, whether they can be strengthened to meet the aims of the Bill, and whether new processes and mechanisms may be required. The new clause retains the key factors that the proposals must consider, which my right hon. Friend set out: ensuring that decisions are enforceable, and that the process is affordable and accessible. He also mentioned independence, which is another important aspect.

Amendment 2 simply replaces “applies” with “extends” in clause 2(1), which deals with territorial extent. It is a minor technical amendment to reflect more appropriate terminology. Amendment 3 changes commencement to two months after Royal Assent to bring the Bill in line with standard commencement procedure for primary legislation. Amendment 4 removes gas from the Bill’s short title in clause 2, in line with the focus on electricity transmission infrastructure that I have already discussed. Finally, amendment 5 edits the Bill’s long title to reflect its contents in new clause 1. New clause 1 should be added to the Bill, and clause 2, as amended, should stand part of the Bill.

My right hon. Friend raised some questions. He rightly said that retrospective law is typically abhorrent, but asked whether current disputes could be resolved through whatever proposals come forward. We would certainly want current ongoing disputes to be covered once proposals are implemented, but, of course, we do not yet know what those proposals are. Our intention is to establish an alternative dispute resolution taskforce—very grandly named—which will be responsible for putting forward proposals, and we will have to see what ideas are generated by that taskforce. If a dispute is still unresolved by the time that any proposals are implemented, such cases should be able to use any alternative dispute resolution options that result from the Bill, if they are appropriate. If the dispute, of course, is resolved before the proposals are implemented, any options resulting from the Bill will not be required.

My Department did a lot of work to ensure we could serve the people of Northern Ireland, because we could not leave them without that support this winter, but that is not an indication that I or the Government have any appetite to fulfil a function that is properly devolved in Northern Ireland. We respect that, and we want to see those institutions restored as soon as possible, because people in Northern Ireland deserve to have the people they elect delivering the things that have rightly been devolved for them to deliver for the good of people in Northern Ireland. I recognise that we would swiftly move from people welcoming the Minister stepping into a gap to them asking, “What’s your status? How are you making these rules for us?” That is why we really want to see the restitution of people in Northern Ireland determining what happens there.