Climate Change Bill [HL]

In light of the extraordinary complexity of the noble Baroness’s introduction to the amendments, noble Lords may be amazed that I rise to my feet at all and attempt to make one or two clarifying remarks. It is a great pity that the noble Baroness has raised the issue at this stage. It would have been easier and clearer if we had come to debate it when we got to Clauses 21 and 22, which define net credits and explain how the system is designed to work. Perhaps we will return to it on Amendment No. 111, which also addresses the issue by placing limitations over particular periods. Frankly, we will not get very far if we follow the line taken by the noble Baroness and seek to impose a great all-embracing limit on the UK target at this stage. At Second Reading I addressed some of the issues and referred to important evidence given to the committee by my son, who dealt with these matters before it. He works for Climate Change Capital and has spent most of the past weeks in Bali at the conference. I am not sure whether that was for good or ill. He probably knows as much as anyone about the complexities of climate emissions trading and these issues. In his evidence he expressed that it was extremely difficult to form judgments about the exact percentages and figures that we should settle on at this stage. He suggested that when we moved on to the real as opposed to the draft Bill, we should make sure that the climate change committee was not just given the task of recommending the UK’s share of credits and ensuring that the UK made a full and adequate contribution to the reduction of climate change, but that it should be able to embrace the issue of the international contribution. My son spoke rather effectively and at some length about the importance of making sure that we got the contribution not just from industrial nations but from the rest of the world as well. It does not matter in improving the environment where in the world we make the reductions. There are powerful arguments for ensuring that substantial contributions are made outside this country, arguments which I need not develop further now as I spoke on them at Second Reading. The conclusion that he and I came to, and indeed that the Joint Committee came to in its detailed consideration, was that these were exactly the kinds of issues that the climate change committee should look at year by year in evaluating the contribution being made by the UK. The committee should ensure that any imported credits were worth while and stood up to international and national evaluation of their value—that they were not just paper transactions or the kind of scams referred to by some critics but made really worthwhile contributions. The committee should also take account of the need to get a value for carbons in this country and in Europe that ensured that full potential was made of industrial development, and so on. This, surely, is exactly why we have a climate change committee. My son is rather an expert on these matters and spends most of his life dealing with nothing else. If he feels that he is totally unable to arrive at the right percentage to put into any part of the Bill at this stage, I am quite certain that I have no right to form a judgment about percentages, and I am pretty confident—and I say this having heard the speech of the noble Baroness—that nor is she. All this talk about 70 per cent of this and 30 per cent of that and 18 per cent of this and that is meaningless, frankly, when debated in those terms in this House. I strongly urge the Committee to follow the recommendations of the Joint Committee on the draft Bill, which spent a lot of time considering these issues. It reported on them in pages 30 through to 35, covering the whole issue of supplementarity and strongly urging that the Bill be amended, "““to give the Committee on Climate Change a duty to report annually on the use of carbon credits in the preceding year. In doing so, the Committee should be required to give an opinion on the robustness of the schemes under which these credits have been issued, the effectiveness of these credits in reducing global greenhouse emissions, and the transparency with which the Government has reported their use””." We made other similar recommendations on the slightly wider issue of the Kyoto Protocol to which the noble Baroness referred. I suspect that we shall return to this matter and I do not want to delay the Committee too long. I hope that we shall come back to it when we come to Clauses 21 and 22, which is the appropriate place to do so. We should look at the issue there and in the terms of the job that we are giving to the climate change committee, because it really is a ludicrous proposition that we in this House can come to sensible decisions about particular percentages applied in this extremely complex and changing situation.