Climate Change Bill [HL]

Although it seems that the three-year targets would be onerous on business, it is not as if the clock is reset every time you go back to the start of the budgetary period. In the sectorial targets that were mentioned you would be building on those things that have come before, especially in the energy industry. It would have to meet this. We should not underestimate the job that the Government are setting out. The task ahead is to make a 2 per cent cut, year on year, for the next 40 years, which is not a small amount to propose. My problem with a five-year period is the very real opportunity to put back the difficult decisions to the end of the period, especially for any Government that had just come in and were making up the policies. We have a major issue here. If we are to keep within the graph, we have the issue that there might be a particularly warm winter. We might have the same situation as last winter, when the spot price on gas meant that coal-fired power stations were pulled back on-line. There is nothing to say that, although we have had this great dash to gas, in a few years’ time, with the nuclear stations coming off-line and gas prices going up because of external factors, coal-fired power stations will not be brought on-line to meet that need, and we would go into reverse on these targets. Therefore, to look at a five-year graph might be a problem. If we are talking about 40 years, in five years we are talking only about meeting eight targets. If we are talking about three years, there are 12 targets to meet, which can be met on an incremental basis. I quite understand the political aspect of the argument that ““perhaps we should leave it””. In a number of Bills that I have dealt with, whenever anybody talked about something being on a five-year basis, in parliamentary terms, it was always on the understanding that it was never going to happen. If it was Lords reform for the next Parliament, it would be put into the next Parliament because it was never going to happen. Perhaps that is a cynical way of looking at it, but it is a very definite political way of looking at it. I have a question for the Minister. Has any analysis been done on how long the average Secretary of State has lasted in office over the past 40 years? If we are talking about the next 40 years it is quite possible that a Secretary of State will, in their period of office, see only one of these targets met on a three-year basis, if they are lucky. If you did the analysis, you would find that, even on a three-year basis, most Secretaries of State would not see even one. In some cases, they move on to greater things; in other cases, obviously, they just get fired or end up in your Lordships’ House. Five years seems a short period of time, but it is based on building on the building blocks. Three years has merit. I am sure that this is an issue to come back to, because there is a political argument. If you think that another Government are going to have to pick up the pieces, will that make the difficult decisions easier or harder to take?