My Lords, these regulations, and the Electricity Supplier (Excluded Electricity) (Amendment) Regulations 2023, were laid on 8 and 20 February 2023 respectively, and were recently debated in the other place.
The purpose of the Electricity Supplier Obligations (Excluded Electricity) (Amendment) Regulations 2023 is to improve the operation of the EII exemption scheme. This will ensure that access to the scheme for existing recipients is not negatively impacted by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, and that new applications can benefit from the scheme earlier than would otherwise be possible.
The purpose of the Electricity Supplier Obligations (Green Excluded Electricity) (Amendment) Regulations 2023 is to ensure that electricity suppliers in Great Britain contribute to CfD scheme costs more in proportion to their market share, regardless of whether they source electricity from the EU or the UK.
I acknowledge the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and the other place, all of which have provided helpful reviews of these regulations.
These statutory instruments amend the Electricity Supplier Obligations (Amendment & Excluded Electricity) Regulations 2015 and the Contracts for Difference (Electricity Supplier Obligations) Regulations 2014.
The Electricity Supplier Obligations (Amendment & Excluded Electricity) Regulations 2015 provide for a scheme that helps to mitigate the risk of carbon leakage by exempting eligible businesses from a proportion of the costs of funding renewable electricity and minimise the risk of companies or production moving to overseas territories with less robust net-zero targets. These are costs associated with funding the renewables obligation, the contracts for difference and the small-scale feed-in tariff schemes. The costs associated with these schemes are passed on by electricity suppliers through their electricity bills. They have a particularly high impact on foundation industries such as steel, paper, chemicals and cement, which are critical to many infrastructure projects and provide well-paid, highly skilled jobs across the United Kingdom. As foundation industries, these businesses are critical in the development of new projects, including offshore wind, and therefore play an important role in the transition to net zero.
The exemption also provides relief for new and emerging industries, such as battery manufacturers—critical to electric vehicles—and manufacturers of semi-conductors, which are of key importance to the UK high-tech economy. They provide jobs not only directly but indirectly, such as in the aerospace and automotive sectors. They employ people from Cornwall to Kent and from Grangemouth to south Wales.
The original legislation was put in place in 2017 and since then over 320 businesses have benefited from the exemption. Businesses which applied in 2017 are now due to be reassessed under the regulations; they will need to be reassessed this year using the last three years of data. For these businesses, this will include the 2020 and 2021 trading periods. This new instrument makes amendments that will allow businesses to exclude data from that period, which, of course, does not reflect the normal course of their business, thereby preventing an unintended consequence from the Covid pandemic’s effect on industry.