§ 13. Mr. Rostasked the Secretary of State for Energy if he will report progress on the city combined heat and power district heating schemes which his Department is supporting.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy (Mr. David Hunt)The work programmes of the Belfast, Edinburgh and Leicester consortia began in April 1985. The Leicester consortium expects to complete its work programme by this middle of the year; Belfast and Edinburgh consortia early next year.
§ Mr. RostIs my hon. Friend aware that prospective combined heat and power city consortia are threatened with rates assessments that are several times out of line with the rates that the public sector electricity boards have to pay for their power station utilities? Is that not an unfair practice against the private sector competing against the nationalised industries, and will he do something about it?
§ Mr. HuntAt present there are no uniformly applied bases for rating systems, and propositions appear to be very high. However, one of the objectives of the study is to identify this sort of problem—[Interruption.]
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. We have a further 10 minutes of questions before we reach this afternoon's main debate.