Finance Bill

I think that there is frustration throughout the House about the fact that, although the Government have committed a considerable amount to assist the 125,000 pensioners, only about 1,500 have received any money. Surprise, surprise, some accountants who are acting as receivers for insolvent schemes appear not to have been exactly speedy in dealing with the paperwork to enable members of those schemes to obtain money from the FAS. If I am going to slag off professions, I might as well go for bust, although there are exceptions such as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South (Mr. Flello) Chart Heat Exchangers is a prime example. It is based in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East, but three of my constituents have notified me of their interest. It is all very sad. From correspondence that I have received, and I suspect from correspondence that he has received, as I understand he has led on the issue in Wolverhampton, it seems that PricewaterhouseCoopers has not been very speedy. According to my understanding of the way in which these things work—perhaps PricewaterhouseCoopers will write to me tomorrow and tell me that I am wrong—the company is being paid but the pensioners are not being paid, and some are indigent for that reason. One suspects that not many people who work for PricewaterhouseCoopers or similar organisations are exactly indigent, so it appears that the cash is in the wrong place. The hon. Member for Dundee, East (Stewart Hosie) is right: the slowness of the system has been extremely frustrating. However, I see cogs turning in his brain, for he is a smart man. Could we have made the system work more quickly? I am not sure that we could. As he said, there are technical difficulties with tracing people and getting the trustees to act. If there had been an immediate payout, we would have risked a situation like the one that we have experienced, to a small extent, with tax credits—overpayments, and people having to pay some of the money back. We have carefully avoided that in the case of the disastrous rural payments scheme. Members will be relieved to learn that that concludes my brief remarks about pensions. I now want to speak about climate change, as I warned the House that I would at the beginning of my speech. Those who know me, and Members who take an interest in Finance Bills and associated matters, will be aware that climate change is a particular concern of mine. Both the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet and the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne properly highlighted green issues such as climate change in their speeches, and the amendment refers to tackling climate change, but yet again we have heard about only one side of the equation. Of course cutting emissions is important, but we do not hear about the other side of the equation—adaptation. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) nods. He and I have had conversations about the issue; I know that he takes an interest in it, and I know that the Government do as well. This is the third or fourth time that I have spoken about this in the last 12 months, and I am about to do so again at some length, and I urge the House once more to start talking about both sides of the equation. We must talk about adaptation to climate change as well as emissions. We must talk about dealing with the effects as well as the causes. The point that I always make, and will continue to make until Opposition Front Benchers understand it a little better—I believe that my Front Benchers have understood it, and I will explain why in a moment—is that we are dealing with the half of the equation that is broadly beyond our control, because the United Kingdom is responsible for roughly 2 per cent. of world emissions. It is important for us to show global leadership. We emit roughly twice the world average because we are a rich country, and it is important for us to reduce our emissions, but we persist in talking about the half of the equation that is 98 per cent. beyond our control unless we can secure international agreements that can then be enforced—Kyoto, for example, has not been enforced because there is no enforcement mechanism—while not talking about the half that is wholly within our control: effects. We should of course talk about the half that is not within our control, but not at the expense of talking about the half that is.