Climate Change

It is difficult to understand the Minister’s point about annual targets. The assessment will be made in retrospect, after the year in which the carbon emissions happened, so we will already know what the temperature was in the winter and what the GDP growth was. Both of those are easy adjustments to make in any benchmark, and the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England makes that sort of adjustment every month. I cannot therefore understand why Ministers persist in arguing that it is too difficult for the Committee that they propose to set up in the Climate Change (Effects) Bill.