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Mr. Chope: Does my right hon. Friend envisage competition between the different regions over targets, over which of them had met their targets or exceeded them, or over the margins by which the targets had been exceeded?
Mr. Forth: That is always a possibility, but my initial reaction to my hon. Friend's suggestion is that I am unsure how productive that approach would be, given the variation between regions. Indeed, if he and I are to follow our own precept—the importance of local decision making—we need to be cautious about taking a competitive approach to target setting at regional level. We expect a lot of the heavy lifting to be done by local authorities, so although my hon. Friend's suggestion is intriguing, for the moment, I would probably set it to one side.
I hope that the Minister and the Bill's promoter will give serious thought to my suggested approach. I am genuinely trying to make the Bill more workable, and I have doubts about a blanket, national approach. If we are to remain focused, we need to work our way carefully through—
Mark Lazarowicz: I appreciate the right hon. Gentleman's close scrutiny of the Bill, but it might have been a little more helpful had he accepted my invitation to serve on the Standing Committee. He could have pursued these points in detail in that Committee, and we might have been able to satisfy his concerns and to reach a consensus.
Mr. Forth:
That is a possibility; on the other hand, it might have prolonged consideration in Committee.
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Rather than consisting of a happy band of like-minded people involved in a rubber-stamping exercise, the Committee might have had to debate these issues at length. I accept that there is a trade-off and that the hon. Gentleman is entitled to take the view that, instead of having enthusiasts on such Committees, we should have people with seriously opposing views who participate in serious debates. Had that happened, we would probably barely have dealt with the first group of amendments before us in one average Standing Committee sitting. However, I accept that there is a plus and a minus.
Mr. Chope: Does my right hon. Friend accept that if he and, say, I had been serving on that Committee, it is most unlikely that the Bill would have reached consideration on Report today, and that the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) would have missed his slot for this Friday?
Mr. Forth: Yes, but the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) is in a very fortunate position—he and I have discussed this, in the friendliest possible way—in that, because the House has sensibly progressed and passed so few Bills this Session, which gladdens my heart, he has a vast array of Fridays ahead of him on which he can bring the Bill back to the House. So we can take a leisurely view: there is no time pressure at all and wherever we may end up today, the hon. Gentleman can happily bring the Bill back next Friday, or on a subsequent Friday, and we can continue our debate. We may or may not finish it then, and if not, he can bring it back again. In my experience, that is a very fortunate, if not unique, position for such a Bill to be in. So we can take a much more relaxed approach than might otherwise be the case, and the 99 happy souls who have just gone through the Aye Lobby can come back on other Fridays and express their support for the Bill. I am sure that they will be delighted to do so. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his good fortune, and he is quite properly able to take advantage of his prominent position in the private Member's Bill ballot.
I return to the regions, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as you doubtless want me to do. I hope that the House begins to see my thinking. A regional approach would be uniquely appropriate to the subject of this Bill, given the variations in housing density that I have mentioned. In that context, we have yet to explore the viability of a target-based approach. The assumption is that targets are the way ahead, and we all know how fond this Government are of targets, but what will be the policy outcome if they are not met? There is the interminable argument as to whether one should pitch targets at a low or realistic level in the expectation that they will be met, or at a deliberately much higher level in the hope that they will be met, while fearing that they will not. That is a separate issue. The more important issue is what happens if, the targets having been set and measured, we find that we are failing to meet them? We would probably be able to respond much better, in a more focused and practical way, at regional level than we would be able to do at national level, for a variety of reasons. We could then bring to bear the combined resources of the Government and local authorities, and
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if appropriate regional authorities, in so far as they are relevant, rather than attempting to deal with the matter nationwide.
1.45 pm
Mr. Chope: Given, for example, the recent national target to reduce poverty among children, the Government missed that target by 300,000 children. Would that have had the same prominence in the media if a series of individual regional targets had been missed?
Mr. Forth: I am sure that my hon. Friend is right in that. That is one of the trade-offs or balances that we inevitably have to strike in these matters. There is the impact that the figures might have. I concede to my hon. Friend that there is a risk that if we went down the regional approach that I am suggesting there might not be the impact that the national figure might have. That is a presentational impact, with, perhaps, policy repercussions on Government. Against that, I am prepared to trade off what I believe would be the benefits of a more focused and a more regional approach.
at the moment, we are talking about a national target, but this would apply equally to my regional targets—
I do not know what that means. I hope that the Minister will sum up this part of the debate. He might tell us what he envisages would be the departmental or governmental response to a failure to meet a target, be it national or regional, not least bearing in mind that new clause 4 appears to have placed much of the responsibility for the delivery of this policy on local authorities rather than on national Government. It says, interestingly—here is the escape hatch—that if
"the Secretary of State does not designate a target under subsection (1) he shall publish forthwith a statement of his reasons."
If we take the regional approach that I am suggesting, and if we were to undertake what amounts to a pilot scheme in one of the regions, the Secretary of State might want to return, having conducted that pilot project, to say, "I do not think that the target approach will work in this case," for whatever reason. He might say that the Government were not able sensibly to formulate a target or that they fell so far short of it that the outcome demonstrated that the targeting approach, in this context, did not make very much sense, or whatever.
The let-out, if we want to put it that way, is interesting. Funnily enough, I rather welcome it. I do not see any point in a Bill such as the one that is before us trying to shackle any Secretary of State so much, and certainly not to oblige him to provide targets, either national or regional, to such an extent that if, for some reason, they were not met, we would then have to continue to produce endless revised targets—something that the Government have often done in the past—that is, to set a target, fail to meet it and so change the target downwards so that it is then more easily achieved. That
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does not get us anywhere. In a funny way, the let-out, if I may call it that, in subsection (6), probably makes a degree of sense.
Mr. Chope: Is my right hon. Friend not concerned that the let-out is linked into a specific date, which is 1 November 2008, as set out in subsection (2)? Does not that make him rather suspicious?
Mr. Forth: I am a naturally suspicious sort of person. It does not take my hon. Friend to encourage any suspicion in me. That part of the clause gave me some cause for thought. I do not know what the significance of 1 November 2008 is—it may be of some magical or mythical significance in government, in the environmental lobby or whatever. It is something that escapes me.
Mr. Chope: Is it around the time at which, if the present Prime Minister is still in office, he will have been so for longer than Baroness Thatcher was?
Mr. Forth: I can hardly bear to contemplate that thought. If the Prime Minister is simply hanging on to office in order to exceed the magnificent achievements of Baroness Thatcher, it would be very sad indeed. We will pass on from that thought.
Clause 3(7) would, sensibly if ominously allow the Secretary of State to
or, in the case of my amendment, the targets—
Of course it does, but it brings into question the whole benefit, if any, of the target-based approach. I gave the Bill the benefit of the doubt, because I could have tabled an amendment to remove clause 3 completely and I was tempted to do so. Instead, I decided to be, as ever, positive and helpful in my approach and to seek to make the clause more workable, despite my doubts about it. That led to my attempts to recast it on a regional basis. However, when one realises that the Secretary of State may revise the targets and that, indeed, he does not need to designate any at all, one begins to wonder what the Government and the promoter of the Bill have in mind.
What would happen if the targets were not met? My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch mentioned an important target on child poverty that has just been sadly and dramatically missed. What would be the policy response if insufficient numbers of people put little windmills on their roofs to boost the energy input to their home and, by implication, help to save the planet? Would the Government undertake to subsidise the installation of little windmills, or would they provide tax relief on them? I do not know what would happen and we have had no hint on it. Nothing that I have heard so far has explained to me what will induce people to put solar panels or little windmills on their roofs, where—I hope—they would not disturb their neighbours or destroy the visual impact of their community.
If we were to have a regional approach, which was well defined and set up, properly focused and monitored, and the target were not met, we would have the opportunity on a regional basis to ask where we should go from here. Why is it that the expectation of lots of windmills in East Anglia or lots of solar panels on
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the Isle of Wight or in the south-west of England has not been met? Why have the ambitious and optimistic targets that we have set not been met? What do we now have to do? Do we have to give people incentives? Do we have to introduce penalties? Do we have to try to shame people?
There is any number of possible approaches, but at the moment all we seem to have is wishful thinking. We have endless stories about how climate change is the greatest threat to mankind, but that is so nonsensical as to be hardly worth contemplating. I would have thought that terrorism, war, disease, lack of clean water or avian flu are much more immediate threats to mankind than a rather dubious change in the climate in 50 or 100 years' time. That is just my view and I hope that we will have a chance to explore it in much more detail on Third Reading and if we ever reach the Climate Change Bill.
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