The government disagrees with the Committee’s recommendation [PAC Rec 3]. It is important to recognise that the proposed contract with Drax was not intended to set the path to the adoption of power BECCS for large-scale generation. Rather, the priority was to secure electricity supply at the lowest cost to tax- and billpayers by ensuring that we could deliver dispatchable biomass generation to the UK grid without the additional cost of procuring this via the Capacity Market auction. The proposed contract retains optionality for a future power BECCS transition. Retaining this optionality was a secondary objective to security of supply. The Contract for Difference (CfD) framework cannot bind generators to investment decisions beyond the 2027-31 contract term without effectively binding the government to a policy decision on power BECCS; the full assessment to support this decision hasn’t yet been undertaken. Moreover, the inclusion of contractual requirements around the transition to power BECCS would have exposed the government to an unacceptable level of legal risk, and taxpayers to unacceptable cost risks until any full assessment of power BECCS has been finalised.