Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340
- 348)
MONDAY 21 MAY 2007
MR PETER
LEHMANN AND
MR JOHN
CHESSHIRE
Q340 Mr Gray: As the Local Government
Association does when things go bad in local government but it
does not mean to say that the Local Government Association have
set up a statute.
Mr Lehmann: We have no brief either
way.
Mr Chesshire: My experience of
advisory committees in Whitehall is that they do not tend to issue
annual reports independent of the departments. I am not saying
that is the main thing but it does give us some profile certainly
at periods of time when fuel poverty has risen very severely.
There has been quite a reasonable amount of press attention added
to the political pressure. The very fact that we appear before
groups of MPs like this raises the profile of the subject.
Q341 Chairman: Do you think there
will be a difference between how the Climate Change Committee
will operate compared with yours, because yours is made up, as
you rightly pointed out and was the case in the annex in your
evidence, of a series of representative organisations, some of
whom as you have rightly reminded us have a delivery responsibility
in terms of the policy? Here, looking again at the schedule of
the Bill, the Secretary of State in appointing the members of
the Committee is looking more at their talents, their technical
ability. It is not cast in terms of being a representative body.
In other words, he is looking for technicians as opposed to advocates.
Do you think there will be a difference in essence there, because
you have a lot of campaigning bodies like Help the Aged, for example,
people who are in there, banging the door down, who want to see
progress; whereas these guys have a list of almost mechanical
functions they have to perform, giving advice to the Secretary
of State.
Mr Lehmann: The list of people
is strange. It seems to be rather light, not on representatives
but on anyone from the consumer side. Citizens generally seem
to be not all that well represented. If I read it right—we
are not experts on the Climate Change Bill—the Climate Change
Committee does not seem to be advising on the measures that are
needed. It seems to be giving advice about budgets and how the
budget should be set rather than what the Government should do
to meet those targets. Its role is a bit different, I think. In
answer to your question, yes, it would be different. They might
not be inclined to go as far as we do sometimes in trying to make
sure that our advice is taken.
Mr Chesshire: I would not undermine
the analytical capacity of the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group either.
Fuel poverty is a broad enough subject. People are coming from
very different dimensions of the debate, but at least we have
a lingua franca. I really lie awake at night and think:
how does an economist have a scintillating, technical dialogue
with a professor of climatology at Cambridge University? Trying
to find a common language for these technical specialists to meet
is a principal challenge in my experience of Whitehall committees.
Chairman: I am going to adjourn the Committee
for five minutes. Many of our colleagues from the other side of
the House are involved in some hustings meetings and this has
proved a rather larger draw than discussing the Bill. One of our
number has to depart for five minutes so may I prevail upon your
patience to wait for a few moments?
The Committee suspended from 5.54pm to 6.05pm
Q342 Chairman: I was going to raise with
Mr Chesshire, after thanking him for very kindly doing a comparison
between the characteristics of the kind the Climate Change Committee
and your own, the question of transparency. One of the issues
is how much of the advice and information which the Climate Change
Committee deals with ought, if at all, to be in the public domain.
You were saying that you effectively do not publish that level
of detail but, in the context of what the Climate Change Committee
is going to do, which is going to be giving advice to the Secretary
of State about what his targets and therefore direction of travel
towards those targets is going to be, do you think that information
should be put into the public domain?
Mr Chesshire: Some of it. I would
make a very strong case for the research base to go into the public
domain. Otherwise, people will be arguing from different bases.
It helps peer review and wider knowledge. For example, if it comes
to a debate on the Committee about the extent to which the effort
should be generated within the United Kingdom or traded internationally
or whatever, it might be the case that ministers would seek advice
from the Committee in the run up to a renegotiation of the next
phase of Kyoto, the one after the next one. There may well be
issues where care would be needed. The analogue I can give you
in my experience is the Government Energy Policy Advisory Board,
which I am a member of, which does publish a minute but not always
our discussions which might impinge on foreign states, foreign
policy or defence matters or whatever. One has to be somewhat
discreet as to what goes onto a public domain website.
Q343 Chairman: What about the question
of resources? You were indicating that first of all people on
your committee served on it because they wanted to and that it
was the bodies from which the committee was formed who provided
the resource to enable your work to go ahead, unless I have that
wrong.
Mr Lehmann: Not quite. There are
some resources from the DTI and Defra which are provided. They
are not always quite enough.
Q344 Chairman: Is that for a secretariat
or for research?
Mr Lehmann: Both. There is nobody
employed full time on our work but there is somebody who helps
in a secretariat and people who do research. We get some help
from the bodies who send representatives. That is fairly limited
because they are all under huge amounts of pressure. Generally
we manage. We have not asked for more because we did not think
we ought to be taking money away from the measures for the fuel
poor. There have been some times when we could have done with
a few more resources to do particular pieces of work. I can give
you examples if you would like. It has been a small but not very
serious shortcoming.
Q345 Chairman: Do you have any advice
to give the Committee about the resources which you think the
Climate Change Committee should have, because clearly it is going
to have a continuing role. It is going to have to be there in
the first instance to provide 15 years' worth of advice. It is
going to be a statutory committee. It has a lot of quite technical
things it is going to have to produce information for the benefit
of the Secretary of State on. What kind of resource might it need?
Mr Chesshire: I was rather struck
when I read the partial regulatory impact assessment at page 49,
table four. They are anticipating, as you probably know, the first
year's costs, including all the set-up costs, at £2.25 million
and ongoing annual costs of just under two million, £820,000
for the secretariat, £460,000 for the Committee, though I
do recognise it might appoint sub-committees and those sub-committee
members might be paid, so you cannot divide £460,000 by eight
or nine and get a fee. The research budget is £500,000. It
does not buy a lot if you are exercising big models but particularly
if you need to develop the models to answer these policy questions.
There is a good deal of modelling activity under way within Whitehall,
the interdepartmental analysts' group and so on and also through
the UK Energy Research Centre. I am sure your adviser would know
more than me, but it seemed modest to me. I ran a research unit
with a budget quite considerably bigger than that and without
this ambition. To what extent they can draw on research under
way elsewhere depends on the make-up of the Committee. If many
of them are leading commentators and analysts in their own field,
they will be well embedded in their own disciplines and their
ongoing research agendas, but it did seem to me rather modest.
Q346 Chairman: Do you think that
would inhibit the Committee from having its own in-house, analytical
staff? One always gets the feel, looking at this, that what you
could be doing is employing people who have some knowledge, pinching
everybody else's research and synthesising it as opposed to being
able to have people who could do their own.
Mr Chesshire: I have not followed
this debate with any officials internally within Whitehall, in
Defra, on this particular point but I was struck by how large
the budget is for the secretariat. The Bill does say that the
Committee can appoint a chief executive and other staff. If you
anticipate by reading that earlier section that there is a secretariat,
I would not have assumed when it came to regulatory impact assessment
that it was virtually 40% of the total budget, unless of course
the assumption is that that secretariat comprises both the secretariat
in a conventional sense and some minimum, in-house, core analytical
capacity. That is not made clear in the Bill.
Q347 Chairman: That 500,000 or 750
in year one might be commissionable. Even so, you do not get much
for that.
Mr Chesshire: The secretariat
may well include research directors and so on, but the Bill does
not make that clear.
Q348 Chairman: We have the Secretary
of State before us on Wednesday so we will make certain that we
probe him on those particular matters. When we were chatting informally,
Mr Lehmann, you mentioned that you had one or two points specifically
that you would like to put to the Committee.
Mr Lehmann: First, one of the
key challenges, not the only one for us, is we need to bind in
the other departments in Whitehall and other agencies like Ofgem,
who are not centrally responsible for this. That is one of the
challenges on climate change as well. One way of doing it is to
have a business plan or some sort of agreement with the other
departments about what they will contribute, but some way of tackling
this for climate change will be needed, as for fuel poverty. The
second point is the more specific one that we were rather worried
that the Bill itself does not take enough account of fuel poverty
and the fuel poverty targets. There are some synergies between
meeting climate change and fuel poverty objectives but there are
also some potential tensions. Some policies, for example, to combat
climate change might raise prices; some might not. That would
have an impact on fuel poverty so we think there should be some
specific reference in the Committee's terms of reference to take
account of the impact on the fuel poverty targets. Similarly,
we think there should be more consumer interest and someone more
specifically involved with fuel poverty on the Climate Change
Committee. Finally, you asked us a number of questions about what
the impact of the targets has been and what the impact of the
group has been. There are one or two other inquiries going on
on the Climate Change Bill and we did not have enough time for
this one but we have now drawn up a one pager with four or five
areas where we have made a difference and four or five areas where
we have made very little difference. We would be very happy to
send that to you if it would be helpful. It is ready, pretty well.
Chairman: That would be very helpful
indeed.[6]
The message that comes out of both sets of evidence we have heard
this afternoon is that this is still judged to be work in progress.
Obviously, part of the fact that the Secretary of State quite
wisely has asked for as widespread a consultation as possible
is that when the finished Bill comes out it can be strengthened
by taking on board some of the critical appraisal which has come
to date. Can I thank you very much indeed and also for your written
evidence. We look forward to your further one page summary. Thank
you very much.
6 Ev 92. Back
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