Climate Change Bill [HL]

I regard this amendment as particularly important because it helps concentrate the minds—in the way that I suggested on an earlier amendment—of officials and Ministers on what is actually required. While the Bill speaks in generalities about the ultimate objectives of the legislation in the long term, I wanted to find something in the Bill that was more concrete and which would be a spur to industry to respond. Setting targets against sectoral backgrounds would indicate to industry precisely where we want the changes. With the makeup of the Committee on Climate Change including, if I remember rightly, one person who specialises in innovation and technological developments, one would hope that the team that surrounds that person would also be part of generating the debate. That would be a spur to industry to follow that route. The target for the energy industries, for example, is 37.4 per cent—I have the same briefing as the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale. I would have thought that setting such a target would concentrate the mind on the need to go down the nuclear route as soon as possible—some of us passionately believe that—as indeed, it will send us down renewable routes and other routes that are perhaps not being fully exploited at this stage. I want to tell a little story. Every individual and community can make a contribution if they know that their sector has been identified. I offer as an example the block of flats where I live in London. There are 170 flats and we were arguing with Peverel, the managing agents, about how we could introduce changes in compliance with the objectives of Parliament to reduce energy. Peverel was not introducing any great changes. Last week, in desperation, I took a representative of the managing agents round all the floors of all the blocks in our development and said, ““Take out that light and that light””—every other light throughout the whole development. If we deliver on the number of lights we intend to take out, the result will be to cut our energy bill from £90,000 per annum to about £45,000. That is a 50 per cent cut in a substantial energy bill in one development, which could be replicated nationally in offices, shops, residential accommodation, blocks of flats and community homes throughout the United Kingdom, and certainly in local authorities, where huge amounts of energy are being consumed. If you have a target area—in this case, energy combined with residential accommodation—then people will know what the expectation is in that area, and industry and communities will respond to that objective. I have taken just one area—I could speak at length on road transport and the way in which economies might be produced there—but it is only by identifying these sectoral areas as targets for change and for the reduction of energy consumption that we can realise the ambitions of the Bill.