Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, before I came into your Lordships’ House, I was a member of two independent, non-departmental public bodies, in both of which I had considerable expertise. They were not concerned with climate change. As soon as I came into this House, the Permanent Secretary to the department which ran them telephoned the Chief Whip twice and almost insisted that I should not speak in your Lordships’ House about what I knew. It did not have much to do with these bodies, but the Civil Service immediately brought down the barrier on free discussion. One of the bodies was then subsumed, and nothing much has happened. If we are going to have an independent, non-departmental public body, it needs to be independent, it probably needs on it some of the people referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, and it must be able to say things freely. It should not be a creature of the Civil Service. I want to talk about the price of oil. Several noble Lords have said that the price is going to go up, but not many have ventured to say by how much. I postulate that between 2025 and 2035, the price will cross the £4-per-litre barrier. Once we get into shortages of supply, the price will immediately take off, and there are many reasons why we should expect that to happen. We should be developing alternative means of transport that are powered by electricity. Where the electricity comes from—several noble Lords have made suggestions about that—is beside the point; it has to be used to power the train, vehicle, bus or whatever is used to move people about, and that cannot happen overnight. I was very disappointed with the response of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, to my Question to the Government yesterday: "““What plans they have for further high-speed railway lines within the United Kingdom””." Part of his Answer was: "““The Government plan to undertake such analysis in time to inform the long-term transport plan, which is due to be published in 2012””." That does not reflect much urgency. A high-speed or electric railway, or a fleet of hybrid buses or cars are possible, but the decisions need to be taken to get on with it. These are long programmes, and while 2025 may seem a long way away, it is not long in terms of managing the infrastructure. Several noble Lords made this point, in particular the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave. You do not get the alternatives immediately. If you want to change the way things are done, you have to start planning today, go through the consultation process and then carry out the work. I cannot see any sense of urgency at all in the department to which I have referred. I shall quote from another part of the Answer that I was given yesterday, "““over the next decade there will be an increase in the number of rail passengers of about 30 per cent””.—[Official Report, 26/11/07; col. 1026.]" That would be 3 per cent per annum. I do not think that any train operator is experiencing a growth rate of 3 per cent, most are seeing increases between 6 per cent and 10 per cent. That means that at the end of 10 years you will be hopelessly short of the capacity to move people. The railway cannot shoulder the burden of transporting many more people. As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, it is already full of those who want to travel. Electricity can be generated from a huge number of sources, and I believe that nuclear should be one of them. It is not the view of my party, but I live close to Harwell, the fusion station at Culham, and next to the Institute of Hydrology. I am surrounded by scientists; indeed, I think we have more scientists in the local parliamentary constituency than any other in the country. They are worried that decisions are being delayed because it takes a long time to bring a new source on stream. That is probably all I want to say because everyone has said all that needs to be said about the Bill. The most useful thing I can do is to draw the attention of noble Lords, first, to the fact that the committee must be truly independent of the Civil Service, otherwise people like me who serve on it will resign immediately we sense any interference. I am not talking about proper argument, but direct interference and veiled threats being delivered. Secondly, we have to get on with providing an alternative structure to carry people and goods when oil reaches a very high price, which I am sure it will.