Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, this Bill demonstrates once again how right we were to introduce pre-legislative scrutiny in this House six years ago. I join the Minister and other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Puttnam and his committee on their excellent work. Obviously, the Bill has benefited enormously from it. I shall look at the Bill from a business point of view. My friends in business and industry tell me that they welcome it. As the Minister said, it provides a framework which gives them the possibility of investing and planning for the environment over a long term. The CBI climate change task force has reported positively. I declare an interest as the honorary president of the Environmental Industries Commission, a business organisation which strongly supports this Bill. We have already been actively engaged at events at Defra and BERR, looking at opportunities for business from climate change. Our main concern is the comparable reporting of carbon emissions, to which I think the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull referred. At present, reporting is not comparable because of the use of different methods of calculation. The CBI climate change task force acknowledges that. It speaks of the need to set benchmarks for reporting. I hope that the Minister will see that this happens quickly. The record of business on reporting on the environment is patchy. Unless good practice on reporting carbon emissions emerges soon, the Government will have to make this mandatory, because this reporting is central to the Bill. The need for adaptation is also central. Industry is already hard at work on the development of new metals, plastics, textiles and other materials, and different combinations of all of those, to create new products with a lower carbon footprint and less waste; namely, products which are recyclable and reusable. Again, I declare an interest as the honorary president of Materials UK, which is the main network set up by the Government and business to facilitate knowledge transfer in these new kinds of materials. Sustainable development has already become an imperative part of business and industry, and this Bill will encourage and help it along. The Minister has told us that the Government’s ambitions stretch beyond the United Kingdom. Together with other nation states in the EU, this Bill will set targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. This is a commitment to the European Union and the Commission which I am pleased to see. Other noble Lords spoke of carbon trading, which does not reduce emissions here. I would say that we have to make sure that carbon trading reduces carbon emissions somewhere. I hope that the Government will insist on the United Nations carbon credits and persuade the Commission that the cheaper assigned amount units available in Hungary and Poland as well as Russia do not count, because these credits do not result in cuts in emissions anywhere. That kind of thing will just undermine the Bill. The Government are proud that we are the first country in the world to have a legally binding, long-term framework to cut emissions and adapt to climate change, and they are right to be proud. But being a pioneer is not easy, and obviously the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said that to the scrutiny committee. I was in business in Yorkshire, where there is an old saying that there is both treasure and trouble in being a pioneer. I am anxious that we should win the treasure and avoid the trouble. The treasure lies not only in securing CO2 reductions, but also in being the first to get the mechanics of doing so into operation and getting the so-called first mover advantage. The danger lies in the fact that no one has done this before, so there are no signposts along the way. In these circumstances, the way you recognise the danger is through using data. By that I mean proper data, not froth. I do not mean the kind of data which are frequently used to score political points or sell franchises, but the kind of data which are the key to understanding what you have done and what has to be done—data that can be turned into knowledge. I do not want to sound like an accountant or consultant, and I do not want politicians to be managers. I just want to avoid the self-generated problems that we have been experiencing recently. I know that much of this work will be delegated to the Committee on Climate Change. The noble Lords, Lord Waldegrave and Lord Taylor, want it to be beefed up, as does the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull. They are right, but I do not think that that is enough, as I shall show. The general impression is that these bodies do well at budget management, target management and process management, but because there is no way of accounting for equity as there is in the private sector, it is very difficult for public bodies to gather data which really monitor performance—the kind of data valued by management in the private sector as a way of seeing who does well and who does badly. The UK emissions trading scheme was the first of its kind, and those working in it developed expertise in exactly this way, so that today they dominate the international emissions trading world. We need to learn from this. The National Audit Office provides a very useful service in exposing incompetence and waste, and the resulting embarrassment produces change, but that is just not good enough for this venture. Clauses 21 and 22 talk about carbon units and carbon accounting. In other clauses there are rules for trading schemes, waste reduction and reporting obligations. Part 2 establishes the Committee on Climate Change and obliges it to provide annual reports and accounts. It has to advise in connection with carbon budgets and provide other advice or assistance, but nowhere is there an obligation to collect knowledge, to learn from mistakes, to react to events, to make progress, to create a sense of urgency and avoid unintended consequences, about which the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, spoke. Experience is required for this kind of project. Who is going to manage this and drive it forward? Certainly not the Prime Minister, as suggested by the noble Lords, Lord Taylor and Lord Crickhowell. This is not the kind of Bill that you can put on the statute book and then move on. This is a project that will last for many years. It will cut across every part of government and, somehow, we have to get into the Bill the way in which we are going to manage it properly. The climate itself will not respond to market forces; it will respond only to action taken. This is why the management of the Climate Change Bill is so crucial. As many other noble Lords have said, climate change will have an impact on all aspects of our lives—social and economic, public and private. The Climate Change Bill acknowledges that priorities will have to change in many aspects of our lives. The noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, reminded us that all parts of government will have to be joined up to promote the activities consistent with the targets in the Bill. For instance, transport and land use policies will have to change. Building an additional runway at Heathrow while at the same time claiming that with the Bill we are taking steps to reduce emissions will cause the public to think that the Government speak with two voices or that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. This would be fatal. The purpose of the Bill is to influence public opinion and to win public support for the moral decisions about which the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, and the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, spoke. Without it, we will fail. With these provisos, I support the Bill and wish it every success.