Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee: Energy Bill: Sixth Report

1.   This Government Bill would:

·  establish the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) as an independent regulator;

·  transfer to the OGA most of the Secretary of State's existing regulatory powers on oil and gas; and,

·  give the OGA additional powers, including access to company meetings, data acquisition, retention and transfer, dispute resolution and sanctions.

2.  The Department of Energy and Climate Change has provided us with a memorandum explaining the delegated powers in the Bill.[1] We wish to say at the outset that, on the whole, we found the memorandum impressive: the format is a model of its kind, and the delegations are for the most part clearly explained and justified. We refer below to the small number of cases where unfortunately the memorandum did not live up to this high standard. We note also that the memorandum contains a number of unexplained references to "the basin" and we would urge Departments generally to ensure that jargon of this type is properly explained or, better still, not included in memoranda.