Communities and Local Government/Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

With that important point my hon. Friend anticipates, possibly by reading over my shoulder, some of my remarks. Mechanisms are central to what we do over the coming years. That underlines the sterility of the debate about whether we should have annual targets or three-year or five-year targets. We need interim targets to show the effect of the mechanisms that we put in place and, if necessary, to correct them. Introducing and institutionalising mechanisms such as carbon trading and other devices including green taxes, regulation and various other forms of trading, are the key to how and whether a climate change Bill will have the desired effect. That is where the courage of the Government will be revealed. They must, for example, impose on those caps and trading mechanisms devices that are powerful enough to ensure that carbon levels are reduced. Targets therefore follow mechanisms and do not precede them. The Government have already introduced a number of mechanisms which have begun to point us in the right direction—the carbon levy, the landfill tax, the beginnings of the UK carbon trading system and the push that the Government are undertaking towards Europe-wide carbon trading, the renewable transport fuel obligation, and the energy review and possible role of microgeneration. The Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Act 2006—a private Member’s Bill in which I was involved to some extent last year—will introduce some of those changes. It is important that the mechanisms which we put in place go far further to meet the challenges that the Stern review has set us and that we will have to meet to achieve a sustainable low carbon economy. As my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) observed, we must bring aviation, including business flights, into a system of carbon trading to ensure that it is a sustainable mode of transport. One of the devices that I see as a means of regulating aviation in future is a cap on who may fly where, possibly by means of a tradable air miles allocation. People would have an individual air miles allocation and if they did not use it, they could trade their allocation with others. Among other mechanisms, those are the sort of bold changes that we will have to make.