Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540
- 559)
WEDNESDAY 23 MAY 2007
RT HON
DAVID MILIBAND
MP AND MR
ROBIN MORTIMER
Q540 Chairman: No, it is the bit
before hand.
David Miliband: I think it will
all be in the report. What is before hand? I do not understand.
Q541 Chairman: Before hand is the
budget. The report is how we have done.
David Miliband: No, there is annual
report on progress.
Q542 Chairman: But when the thing
starts off in 2009 the first act of the Climate Change Committee
is to present you with some recommendations for your budget. Nothing
has happened yet. They are not going to write a report until something
has happened. What we are saying is, given this agreement or this
indication of transparency, is that—
David Miliband: The first thing
they do is they recommend the budgets. That is not about views,
that is about their recommendations for the budgets for the periods
up to 2022. If you are asking me will their recommended budgets
be in the public domain, the answer is yes.
Q543 Chairman: Together with any
reasons underpinning why they have come to that conclusion?
David Miliband: Yes. You have
got a point here about views, which is in respect of a word that
you have picked up about their reports on progress. It will be
for the Committee to decide how much or how little reasoning they
want to put forward, but my working basis is that their recommendations
would be in the public domain and their views on progress would
be in the public domain.
Chairman: Mr Hall, I apologise.
Q544 Patrick Hall: That was going
to be my question which you snatched from me! Can I just make
the point. The Secretary of State has agreed that there should
be maximum publication so that people are well informed?
David Miliband: What I have said
is that their reports should be put into the public domain.
Q545 Patrick Hall: No, not just the
annual report to Parliament?
David Miliband: And their recommendations
on budgets.
Q546 Patrick Hall: That is all right:
because that would be more productive, would it not, than what
we were talking about earlier on the judicial review? If Parliament
and the public, possibly through the media, who knows, are well
informed, then that is the sanction?
David Miliband: Of course.
Q547 Patrick Hall: And that is what
we should be concentrating on?
David Miliband: When I was answering
Geoffrey Cox I did make the point that you have got the public
opinion, politics and the law, and of course that is right. If
I was sitting here saying we have got this secret process; no
one is going to know how we are doing until the end of five or
15 years and then, boom, you could end up in the courts, you would
say is that not a rather stupid way of organising it? Should we
not be able to track how the population, different parts of society
know how we are doing, and the answer is, "Yes".
Q548 Mr Cox: Can I follow up on one
thing. Would you envisage, if the Committee strongly disagreed
with an action taken by the Government, that it might publish
a report setting out the basis of its disagreement?
David Miliband: I think that the
provisions for the Committee are three-fold in respect of that:
(1) they have their recommended budgets, (2) they have their reports
on progress, (3) they can do work as requested by the Secretary
of State.
Q549 Mr Cox: Can I stop you there.
The duty under clause 21 is a duty to lay before Parliament each
year a report, but it does not suggest that they could not produce
interim reports or produce bulletins on that report?
David Miliband: It certainly does
not.
Q550 Mr Cox: Thus, if they disagreed
with the specific action of the government that they thought was
going to take the matter out of the carbon budget at any particular
time, they might produce a bit more?
David Miliband: You might think
that I would say this, but to put it another way, if you said
to me: is it impossible for the Independent Committee to issue
a laudatory proclamation about a piece of government initiative
that they think is spectacularly effective and would it be appropriate
for them to do so three weeks before a general election that might
be tightly fought on the issue of climate change, I might hesitate,
you might hesitate before thinking that was a good thing, but
neither laudatory proclamations nor stinging indictments are precluded
on the face of the Bill. I think any committee would think very,
very carefully before it allowed itself to be dragged into what
might be perceived to be party political lobbying or activity.
Q551 Mr Cox: Of course one does not
mean party political. If one is comparing this to a committee
like the Monetary Committee or something like that, one means
something---. I understood part of the role of this Committee
was to take it out of politics to some extent and achieve some
kind of consensus, scientific or otherwise. If the Committee perceives
that the policy is taking a wrong turning, it would have, would
it not, a duty to say so?
David Miliband: It does not have
a duty, or at least it does not have a duty as per the legislation
that we have proposed and that we are discussing.
Q552 Mr Cox: Report on progress?
David Miliband: Would it be sensible
for the Government to preclude that in legislation? No, I do not
think so, because I think that the Government should treat committees
like adults. Equally, the strength of, for example, the Monetary
Policy Committee comes from the regular rhythm of reports that
it does. It does not come from the uncertainty that they might
pop out with a report on an ad hoc basis. They have their
inflation report and they do that in the appropriate way. I think
the strength of the Committee would be to come from the maturity
of adhering to that. As I say, that would be for the Committee
to decide.
Q553 Lynne Jones: You said earlier
that the Committee might be asked to advise the Government on
specific issues. What would be the status of that advice? Would
it be made public or would it have the same status as advice from
civil servants, for example. The Monetary Policy Committee produces
minutes of its meetings. Should there not be that kind of openness
and transparency in terms of the workings of this Committee?
David Miliband: I think the matter
of its minutes is a matter for the Committee to think about. I
think that if it produces a report on a specific issue, then my
presumption would be that that would go into the public domain.
To continue the earlier example that we had, if the Committee
was asked: "What should you do about boilers in small houses?"—it
is does not seem to me to be a likely example, but you get the
point—
Q554 Lynne Jones: Surely your presumption
is not sufficient. It should be clear from the start what openness
there is going to be about the workings of this Committee. It
may be that you as the Secretary of State would be perfectly happy
for advice to be published, but you may not be in that position
for ever and surely it should be laid out exactly the level of
openness that is going to appear, and to what extent the Committee
will be able to, for example, identify specific government policies
that may be counter-productive in terms of achieving its targets?
David Miliband: I think it is
important to emphasise, this has been set up not as a policy-making
committee, and there are two aspects of that that are important,
but one is the most important. It has been set up to set carbon
budgets. In other words it is focused on outcomes. It has also
been set up to monitor progress towards the achievement of those
outcomes. That is why I say it has not been set up as a policy-making
body. There is provision, it does not say exceptional, but there
is provision for a Secretary of State to ask for specific advice
about a policy matter, but I think, consistent with my answer
to one of the earlier questions about why have we not got all
manner of different targets about fuel poverty or anything else
on the face of the Bill, because this is concerned with the overall
level of carbon emissions (greenhouse gases), that is their locus,
that is their USP.
Q555 Sir Peter Soulsby: The credibility
of this Committee is going to depend crucially on its independence
and its resources. How are you going to resource it and how are
you going to ensure its independence?
David Miliband: I do think the
independence comes from the role of the Nolan independent appointment
procedures. You ought to make sure that is done, we will want
to make sure that is done in an appropriate way that guarantees
their independence. In terms of their resources, we have done
this modelling of how much they might cost. I do not know if you
think it is too much or too little.
Mr Mortimer: Two million a year.
David Miliband: I was trying to
find the page.
Q556 Chairman: Forty-nine might be
helpful. That says how much it will be.
David Miliband: I do not know,
what is your thinking, Peter.
Q557 Sir Peter Soulsby: I think certainly
they would need to ensure that they had enough to conduct their
own analytical work without having to rely unduly on the resources
of the department, that they could be seen to be commissioning
what was necessary to come to their own conclusions?
David Miliband: I would not want
them to have to duplicate work that was done in the department,
but, equally, making use of departmental statistics does not seem
to me to be undue in its reliance.
Q558 Sir Peter Soulsby: But being
serviced by departmental staff in the extreme would seek to undermine
your perception—
David Miliband: They have got
a research budget of three-quarters of a million quid in the first
year. That seems quite substantial. I do not know what the going
rate for brilliant academics is these days, but that seems to
me to give them something to be going on. I do not know, is the
Committee's view that the costs are too high or too low?
Q559 Chairman: I think the difficulty
in answering that question is to know precisely what kind of a
work programme the Committee might think that it needs to do on
its own. Obviously, there is a vast army, that I think our line
of questioning has indicated and, for example, the witnesses who
have come before us indicate that there is no shortage of advice,
expertise and knowledge. It is a question of distilling it out
for the purpose you have intended. I do not know, for example,
whether in year one £750,000 for research is about analysing
the literature, if you like, that is already out there or doing
their own individual research to be truly independently coming
to their conclusions.
David Miliband: It has got to
be a mix, has it not?
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