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Members of the Committee will appreciate that this is an important change in terms of increasing the role of the climate change committee. At the heart of the relationship between the committee and the Government is the kind of advice that will be passed between them. We want to ensure that the reports on policy are not merely suggestions. Of course, we are leaving the implementation of the policies in the hands of the Minister, as that is the only way in which the climate change committee can effect change. However, we feel that it is important that the strategy that he or she implements comes from the experts and that the committee be encouraged to produce a detailed plan on the ways in which carbon emissions can be reduced and climate change stemmed. This will make it easier for the committee and others to come to an independent view on whether the policies are sufficient to meet future budgets and to help monitor progress towards the budget as time passes. I beg to move.
Lord Campbell-Savours: I shall intervene briefly to speak tangentially to the amendment, as this offers me a peg to put a thought into my noble friends mind.
A very interesting committee, the Quadripartite Committee, has been established in the other place. It draws on the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Defence Committee and the Overseas Development Committee and deals with issues of defence sales. Some say that it has not been successful in the sense that it has not been able to secure the required level of accountability, but it was what I had in mind some years ago when I was pushing the idea of a defence exports scrutiny committee. If the mechanisms in the House of Commons are correctly constructed, you can get a forum for accountability that does not meet like a Select Committeeweekly, two-weekly or whateverbut at the right time to take evidence on issues when something has happened and where the view of Parliament should at least be in the mind of Ministers and others when decisions are taken.
I just wonder whether climate change as an issue should not necessarily be left to a committee such as the environmental protection committee. The issue would be only one item on its many agendas but it would obviously be a critical one. Perhaps a structure will be established in Parliamentpossibly a Joint Committee arrangement; I do not knowthat parallels that sort of quadripartite reporting mechanism in order to deal with developments in this area as they make their way through departments.
I should think that that is a way of communicating on issues such as targets for action, what is going to happen and what action is being taken, as a mechanism for ensuring that Parliament is kept informed during this whole process. As I say, the body would not meet weekly or bi-weekly as Select Committees in the House of Commons do but would be like the Quadripartite
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Lord Crickhowell: I strongly support my noble friends amendment for the reasons that I indicated when I spoke briefly on the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. It seems extremely important to spell out a strategy on how these matters are to be dealt with. I am pretty confident that the Minister, in response to the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, will say, That is absolutely nothing to do with us in this House or with the Government; it is a matter that will be decided by the other place.
As for whether there will be a separate committee, I would have thought, given my experience of working, for example, on the European Union Committees sub-committee on foreign affairs and defence, that if a strategy paper were to be presented to Parliament, it would not be lost as a single item to be dealt with in a great batch. An appropriate House of Lords committee would almost certainly decide that it was exactly the kind of topic on which it should devote a day to cross-examining witnesses. Without going down the road of inventing parliamentary procedure, a matter which is not for us, my noble friends amendment would by its very nature produce exactly the kind of examination that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, wants.
Lord Oxburgh: Neither Clause 11 in its present form nor the amendment quite captures the fact that you can have much more detailed plans for carbon budgets or whatever for the next five years than can be planned 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ahead. I am therefore not entirely happy with the proposal that these budgets should be detailed. I suggest that when this clause comes back it should recognise the difference in detail that can be offered for different stages. This goes back to the amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, withdrew. I think that he was trying to provide for a relatively quick response for the immediate future, for the first five years. What will happen in 10 or 15 years can be a matter for much more deliberation. I hope that it will be possible to incorporate some of these ideas in a revised clause.
Lord Jay of Ewelme: I was going to make almost exactly the same point as the one that the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, just made. It seems to me that, as the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, said a few minutes ago, this is a fundamental part of the Bill. Unless there are proper policies and a proper strategy to meet the budget, it will not amount to very much. It is hugely important to get the timing right. I rather like the six-month proposal for the first part of the period but think that it would be entirely unreasonable to expect reports for future periods to be produced in six months. A certain unbundling of the clause may be needed to reflect these different time horizons.
Lord Davies of Oldham: I am grateful to the last two noble Lords who spoke because they represented the Governments thinking on this matter. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, that he has done the Committee a service by raising the issue, as did the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, with his previous amendment. We will certainly look at whether more detail should be provided than is currently provided for in Clause 11. I assure the noble Lords that their thinking is very much the Governments thinking on this.
Perhaps I may deal first with the extraneous matter. I had a wonderful experience over the weekend watching that great film The Kite Runner, but I did not think that I would be involved in flying kites this afternoon. My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours has flown one of the more obvious kites and I will neither cut it down nor respond to it except to say, as the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, said, that the safest position to adopt is to point out that this is nothing to do with the Government or with this place but is for the other place. My noble friend is always ingenious. He has tagged his proposal on to this amendment and he deserves a response.
I can only assure my noble friend that both Ministers on this Bench, particularly the senior one, were alert and listened carefully to what he said. He has firmly registered the point with the Government and we will see what needs to be done. However, I am with him on the point that the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, indicated in his contribution. We all recognise that Parliament has a very important role to play in this and it would be helpful if considerable thought was paid to the mechanisms by which that is done. I am grateful to my noble friend for his kite-flying.
I assure the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, that the report required under Clause 11 will already have high status. As it will set out the proposals and policies that the Government intend to implement on carbon budgets, it is an important report. However, I am not clear that calling the report a strategy or requiring that it contain measures in addition to proposals and policies will change its nature very much.
There is also the obvious problem that calling it a climate change strategy could be somewhat misleading. After all, this report will be concerned only with mitigationmeasures to reduce emissions. It will not cover the crucial issue of adaptation to climate change. That is the subject of Clause 49, which appears later in the Bill. Although the Government are not oblivious to the important points which the noble Lord makes about the necessity for strategy, this is not the appropriate clause for it because this report is more narrowly defined to deal with the more narrowly defined issues.
The noble Lord has raised an important topic and we will have a chance to discuss it much more fully when we reach Clause 49. As he will also recognise in my response to the noble Lords, Lord Oxburgh and Lord Jay, our minds are very far from closed on the level of detail required. On that basis, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach: I thank the Minister for that response. Words mean everything and nothing, really. I suppose that the difference between report and strategy is that report tends to be retrospective while strategy is looking forward. The whole thrust of this Bill is about the need to look forward to see what we do next. We need to report and to know where we are, but we also needand this is the point of these amendmentsto place centre stage the notion that we require methods for addressing the issues and a course of action that is clearly stated by the climate change committee and available to the Government. As I said, we need more than just suggestions and I hope that that will run through all the Governments thinking on this. The Committee on Climate Change is not just a suggestion box. It exists to provide the thrust of the argument that the Government will then use to implement policy.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, raised an interesting point in his kite-flying, which, although not strictly speaking part of these amendments, goes to the heart of what I suspect Parliaments response will need to be. I would like, as I am sure we all would, Parliament to play an active role in following this Bill through to the Committee on Climate Changes activities and the Governments responses. I am sure that Parliament will find vehicles for doing that, not just in another place but here, too. Indeed, the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill has been one of its strengths. If these debates have resonance, it is because there is a cadre of Members speaking in Committee who have great experience of the Bill through the time that they spent on the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam; they have brought that knowledge to our debates, which has been very useful. I would like to think that post-legislative scrutiny will be equally important to the parliamentary process. I keep on about these three things: Parliament, the Government and the Committee on Climate Change. This Bill can be effective only if all three feel that they have bought into the process. However, having heard what the Minister said, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
The Lord Speaker (Baroness Hayman): Is Amendment No. 60 not moved? Are we sure?
The Earl of Caithness: I think that my noble friend might want to move this amendment.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach moved Amendment No. 60:
The noble Lord said: I am sorry. I hope that I can be forgiven for losing myself in all the papers that I have here.
Lord Teverson: Perhaps I may just say to the noble Lord that I understand his problem.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach: Indeed. Perhaps I should have taken more time.
This is all part and parcel of the debate that we have just had. The last group of amendments would have required the Committee on Climate Change to publish a detailed climate change strategy and these amendments would require the Secretary of State to implement the strategy. We are trying to ensure that the Secretary of State buys into the strategy that the committee has produced.
This is another attempt by us on these Benches to cut out the politics surrounding the efforts to stop climate change. Without a duty to implement, it would not matter what sort of advice or strategy the Secretary of State received. There would be room for political manoeuvring at the expense of progress. I am immensely sceptical of the spaces in the Bill that will allow political decisions to nullify scientific conclusions with inaction. We need a duty to implement the strategy that the committee presents to the Minister. Placing that duty on the Secretary of State would be consistent with the approach taken in the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000, which in Section 2(1) places a duty on Ministers,
Section 2(5) requires that Ministers,
There is consistency here with previous legislation.
Although it could be argued that the Secretary of State is already under a duty to meet the budget and so will have to implement the policies and proposals in the report, closing this loophole would ensure that the policies and proposals put forward are the ones implemented, rather than a different set of policies that the Secretary of State may decide suits him better. This is important in monitoring Ministers progress towards meeting the budgets. I beg to move.
The Earl of Caithness: I support my noble friend, who has said what I was going to say on my Amendment No. 64A, which is grouped with this amendment. The wording that I have used is similar to that quoted by my noble friend and would have almost the same effect. I based mine on Section 2(5) of the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000, so I will not repeat what he said. It seems ludicrous that, having presented a report under Clause 11, the Secretary of State has no duty to implement it.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: My intervention will be modest, technical and brief. I in no way disagree with my noble friends on the Front Bench or with my noble friend Lord Caithness on the spirit of their amendments. I have to confess to an ignorance, which has existed on my part for 30 years in Parliament, as to whether there is any relationship between the wording of the clause and the title of the clause. Clause 11 has the title, Duty to report on proposals and policies for meeting carbon budgets, which does not seem to me
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The Earl of Caithness: My noble friends dilemma would be solved if the Government accepted the amendment and altered the preamble to the clause at line 10.
Lord Rooker: The way in which Bills are drafted changed some time ago. Clause titles always used to be set at the side in about a three-point font so that you could hardly read them. I was always told, You can ignore them. Theyre of no consequence whatever in terms of the legalities. That probably goes some way towards meeting the noble Lords point.
In my short note in response to the amendment, I have an absolute gem of a sentence, which I am determined to put on the record, but first I have one point to make to the noble Lord, Lord Taylor. The Clause 11 report is drafted by the Government, not the committee. There should be no misunderstanding about that. The legal duty to meet each budget, which we discussed at an earlier sitting, provides a strong motivation to deliver the proposals and policies. I think that that was one of our very first debates, on line 1 or 2 of Clause 1 of the Bill. In addition, there will be regular progress reports by the Committee on Climate Change to Parliament under Clause 28. I am sorry to refer to these later clauses, but they set out in some detail the operation of the Committee on Climate Change.
Here is the gem. A legal duty to implement the proposals and policies would be highly unusual in legal terms. Ministers can say all they like about implementation, but a legal dutythis is what my note sayswould be highly unusual in legal terms. On another point, the amendment would be very restrictive. If the Government were unable to implement one element of the planthrough, say, unforeseen eventsthey would be in breach of the law. The same problem would apply if evidence came forward supporting a change in policy approach. It is not intendedthis is not to demean the Bill at allthat the programme should be drafted as a legal document. It is therefore likely that any duty to implement would raise questions about precisely what the duty is and what needs to be done in order to fulfil it, and it would be very difficult to determine whether the duty had actually been fulfilled. Legal duties need to be set out in a way that shows precision and inflexibility. We do not want the proposals and policies to be drafted in this way. We want them to be understood and informative to the public. This goes back to the point my noble friend made about presentation.
Lord Crickhowell: I thank the noble Lord for giving way. Does not what he has just said apply exactly and precisely to line 1 of Clause 1 of the Bill, which seeks to impose a legal duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that the net UK carbon account for 2050 is at
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Lord Rooker: I was conscious as I made that point that I had got the line wrongit is line 5 but it is the first line of the first clause the way the Bill is draftedbut it was a slightly different argument that was being advanced. That line was drafted so as to send a signal to the Civil Service; the noble Lord knows how the culture of Whitehall works. That is what Clause 1, line 1 is intended to do but, with respect, this is a slightly different issue. The duty to implement would create a risk that a Government might choose to limit the policies included in the report in order to avoid a requirement to implement those policies. This could create a barrier to transparent and ambitious policy-making.
A further point, and one that I hope will appeal to your Lordships, is that a duty to implement a plan could be seen as a very broad enabling power for the Government to carry out any actions they proposed through the plan. I have no doubt the Delegated Powers Committee will have a look at that. I only say it could be seen to be a very broad enabling power. I do not think a power of that breadth would win the support of your Lordships House.
I turn to Amendment No. 64A. I appreciate the proposed duty,
The proposals and policies may be intended to provide greater flexibility rather than a simple duty to implement but we think the Bill takes the right approachMinisters always say thatin focusing the legal duty on the outcome. It is the outcome not the process that is important and that is what the Government need to be challenged by. Rather than arguing about the means of achieving the budget we need to know that the outcome has been achieved. This ensures that we can take a forward-looking approach to policy-making and avoid being restricted to policies originally set out in the Clause 11 report when a change in approach since that report might deliver more effective emission-saving. In other words, there has to be a degree of flexibility. If we set this out in a highly restrictive fashion, which is what the initial Amendment No. 60 would do, that would have the exact opposite effect to what your Lordships are seeking to achieve. I note the caveat that this goes back to Clause 1. At Report I am going to better delineate the arguments on Clause 1 and Clause 11.
Baroness Byford: I would like to support my noble friends amendment but I am getting quite concerned by the Ministers response. We are in Committee but we nearly seem to be backing off from making sure that what we are trying to do happens. That worries me excessively. Can the noble Lord point me to a part in the Bill as it stands which would allay these fears? I really am quite concerned that unless implementation is grabbed fully we will not succeed with this Bill in the way we want to.
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