Communities and Local Government/Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He is right that the sooner we know about any shortfall, the sooner we shall be able to remedy the problem. If we cannot measure our activities regularly, we will not be able to deploy our Government’s limited financial resources. An annual carbon budget report will be needed, alongside the activities on climate change. That will focus our progress specifically on the issue of carbon, rather than simply on global warming in general. There should be a single dedicated Cabinet Minister responsible for climate change. I welcome the move towards having a single Minister with responsibility for that, but if we are serious about taking longer term action on the environment, one of the seats at the Cabinet table should be taken by someone focusing entirely on the issue. The Stern report says that climate change should be made our highest priority. so having one member dedicated to it out of a Cabinet of 20-odd Ministers does not seem inappropriate. I support the move to an office of climate change. The Minister for Climate Change and the Environment, who has just left his place, explained in a written answer to me that that office"““will support Ministers as they develop future UK strategy and policy on domestic and international climate change.””—[Official Report, 31 October 2006; Vol. 451, c. 275W.]" In answer to other questions, he explained that there will be both a ministerial board and an officials board, but I was disappointed that that group will not produce reports on an ongoing basis; we will see the effect of that group only on broader Government policy and how it is presented to the House and the public. If the office is to have any teeth, it is worth sharing with us what it is doing in greater detail. I am also cognisant of the changes in the roles of successive Deputy Prime Ministers. Each Deputy Prime Minister—be they Conservative or Labour—defines the job in a very different and special way, as we have certainly seen recently. If Labour Members do not support having a single Minister entirely responsible for climate change, perhaps the Deputy Prime Minister could take on a greater role in advocating dealing with the issue. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, of which I am a member, could play an important part in the pre-legislative scrutiny of the climate change Bill. In no way do I want to prevent the Bill from being considered more generally on the Floor of the House, because there is an urgent need for it, but there might be some merit in having a detailed cross-party discussion of how we set targets, so that we can to depoliticise to some degree the issue before the Bill reaches the Floor. The Select Committee is working on a series of climate change inquiries, the first of which concerns bioenergy, an issue to which I shall return. First, I want to discuss the Committee’s trip to China, to which our Chairman referred earlier. While there, we visited the Jilin province, where we were told that the aspiration was to put a car on the driveway of every Chinese family. The Committee found that enormously worrying, and our concerns were amplified throughout the visit. Several Chinese politicians told us of their distrust of capitalism, and they extended that distrust to our comments on climate change. They felt that what the western world was saying about climate change was potentially a capitalist conspiracy in order to stop—