Climate Change Bill [HL]

I shall also speak in favour of the thrust of the amendment, but will offer one or two cautionary words. Some sectors are self-evident, such as energy. Transport is not just one sector but a variety of sub-sectors. The climate change committee, as much as the Government or more, will have to build up an overall target based on what it thinks is possible in particular sectors and sub-sectors. Overall targets mean nothing unless they are based on an assumption and estimate of what is achievable at the level of sub-sectors and, in some large cases, individual businesses. Over 40 or 50 years, the climate change committee will have to be able, in giving us advice, to acknowledge changing imperatives and technological opportunities over time. The idea that we can look 15 or 20 years in advance and be pretty clear about what will happen in each sub-sector throws me back to my early days as a young economist at university looking at Russian and Indian planning, five-year plans and so on. It is a fine line between targets and sectoral planning. George Brown comes to mind—national plans and so on. The history of national planning is not a great success. This is one of the most important debates of the evening. Once you start thinking that the basis of overall targets is what can be achieved at the level of sectors, sub-sectors and businesses, one starts to see the dangers as well as the opportunities. Three five-year rolling programmes in advance can quickly turn out to be an illusion of planning, and you then get policies to achieve those plans over 15 years. The first conference that I went to as a young university economist was on planning coal production in the UK. All kinds of people told us how much coal had to be produced and how. It was a lot of coal. Eventually, we had to find a way of not producing a lot of coal, because people did not want that amount—certainly not of British coal. I was a Yorkshireman saddened by that. I simply give a word of caution. You can easily enthuse about what policies have to achieve in particular sectors. The challenge for the climate change committee will be enormous, given complex questions such as what is economically possible, what is technologically possible, and how to allow the marketplace to respond over time. Not as many people have quoted the CBI’s work as they have Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and so on, but I thought that the work by McKinsey in Climate Change: Everyone’s Business showed what could be done at a strategic level. It also showed the gap between strategic thinking about sectors and what we are telling the climate change committee that it has to produce in two years’ time. We are expecting it then to produce some pretty important forecasts, on which government policies over 15 years will have to be laid out. When those come before the Government and Parliament there will have to be careful examination of our enthusiasm for what can be achieved and how to achieve it. We will come in later amendments to the role of the Committee on Climate Change. There will always have to be a political judgment about what can be done and how best to guide it into taking us there. I think that the committee can only give guidance, because we could get into real difficulties if it becomes a planning agency for 15-year plans. The thrust of the proposal is enormously to be supported, but addressing the nuances and subtleties of converting it into action that Parliament, the public and industry can support and deliver will be a real challenge.