Climate Change Bill [HL]

That is probably a good reason why we should not discuss the Finance Bill in this House. This has been an interesting short debate. The package of amendments that we have just heard together requires, as a purpose, that the Minister makes a statement of compatibility on any future Bill on any topic—it is incredibly wide and, as the noble Baroness has just pointed out, it would include finance legislation—before Second Reading. Obviously, this compatibility practice only came in under the present Administration. It is taken quite seriously; it is not just a question of the statement appearing with my name as though I have done nothing. I get a note from the lawyers, as every Minister would, and I am required to sign a document before the Bill gets printed. In this House, I have not introduced that many Bills and therefore have not done it many times, but this note is still required when they come from the other place. I have known examples over recent years, which I will not go into, where there has been a debate about particular Bills and the Ministers were concerned to seek extra advice about whether they were truly compatible with human rights legislation. In other words, it is taken extremely seriously in government, and the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, has probably done the House a service in bringing it forward. That being said, the Government are sympathetic to the overall spirit of the amendment. No doubt, ambitious action will be required. I will give the Committee some reasons why it might not achieve that; I emphasise that it is in the way the amendment is drafted, covering every Bill on any topic. The Bill, as it exists, will help drive behaviour across Whitehall—one of the points on which I rested my case in the earlier debates—and, certainly, put the Government’s ambitions to cut emissions on a statutory footing. As I have repeatedly said, Ministers in all departments, not just the relevant department, will receive advice from their civil servants about their duty to abide by the law and to do what they can to meet the targets and budgets established under this Bill. In addition, we are required to set out the policy proposals for meeting carbon budgets each year and to respond to the Committee on Climate Change’s annual progress report. Those requirements are all cross-government and will ensure that the Government are focused on what needs to be done to meet the targets and budgets, whether through primary legislation, regulation, expenditure policies or, indeed, executive action. There are, then, powerful incentives and further safeguards through the impact assessment process that all major policy statements must pass. Secondly, the relationship between the UK’s targets and the level of global temperatures is highly uncertain. As I said earlier, the direct link between many of the issues is not precise, so it would be difficult to determine the impact of individual pieces of legislation. Because many aspects of society and living will be affected by attempts to meet the targets in the Bill, there will be difficulty for the lawyers in assessing any particular legislation. Everything would be covered by the need to make that kind of statement relating to the climate change targets, including legislation on housing, health, or on individual human relationships that have nothing to do with climate change, such as in marriage legislation. It would be incredibly complicated for lawyers to give advice on that, leaving aside the scientific uncertainty in some areas. I am not knocking that. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, is probably not the only person in the Chamber who would have hoped that they would have thought of that. Frankly, it adds to the overall image and perception and the joining-up of government at no cost. Because of the way that the amendment is drafted, following the pattern of human rights legislation—clearly, in opposition, you take a pattern that works, and this works on all legislation—if we were to do it for every single topic covered by a Bill, we would come up against a real problem. It just cannot be done. As I said, I can think of many Bills—I just thought of one, which is only about individual relationships—where making that kind of statement might be more difficult. However, it ought to be possible for a body of legislation, a range of legislation, to be covered by such a statement. I am happy to take the amendment away to take advice on it; I have no doubt that other colleagues will do so as well. I do not think that we can go as far as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, suggests and put a coloured bar coding on it. On the proposal that Ministers in departments other than the lead department should be required on their legislation not just to take into account the legal duty required of government under the Bill but to sign a piece of paper to that effect before the Bill starts on its Parliamentary journey, I counsel against being precise about every piece of legislation. How you define legislation, I do not know. There are better brains than mine in the Parliamentary Counsel Office to consider that. The proposal certainly adds positively to the idea of the Bill being cross-government, upfront and transparent and with genuine extra accountability. I will be happy to look at it on that basis. That is three in a row—no more tonight.