Climate Change Bill [HL]

I shall speak in support of what I conceive to be the essence of this amendment: the preservation of an appropriate balance between Government, Parliament and the science in the broadest sense, embracing the economic as well as the physical and biological sciences, made immanent, one hopes, in an appropriately constituted climate change committee. In briefly elaborating that, I crave the Committee’s indulgence and apologise for being out of the country for the first two Committee sittings. I have read the reports with considerable interest. I was not surprised but very favourably impressed by the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who frequently said that while he did not necessarily agree, he could see the point and would go back to the department. I am equally clear that I am surrounded in this Committee by people who understand far better than I how to construct the verbiage of these arcana, which will put in place properly what we all wish—an appropriate balance between Government, Parliament and a climate change committee. It is not going to be easy. This discussion started as if it was coming from only one Bench, but we are looking at a time span of 50 years in which different Governments will come and go. We need a framework that is robust against those changes. Perhaps I may venture—and then I will shut up—a typical academic mini-discourse on the subject. A fascinating paper is about to appear in one of the world’s premier journals. It is one among many such papers as people concentrate more on the social science of how to resolve what is variously called the free-rider problem, the prisoner’s dilemma or the tragedy of the commons. It is a fascinating and depressing experiment done by a group of people in Europe, but headed in Switzerland. Students were put together in groups and each group member given a chunk of money. They went through 10 rounds of five-year quotas, as it were. They played 10 rounds in which each student had to put in a certain fraction of the money that they owed with the idea that, at the end of the exercise, if they had reached a certain target sum of money, they would all get to keep the money they had not put in. If they failed, however, they lost all their money. It is a crude and flawed metaphor for asking people to make decisions today that will lead to later and later decisions contingent on what other people decide about whether we will achieve the goals that we are trying to set ourselves. Depressingly, the outcome of those experiments was that at the beginning most people tried to cheat and hoped that others would help. Then they realised that they were all going to lose and tried to catch up. There was a curious pattern of not enough action at first and then trying to catch up at the end. More often than not everybody lost and they all went away with nothing. That is why I am concerned about the inevitable political tensions to take it easy now—not to do the uncomfortable thing, not to bite the bullet on nuclear power, not to put in tough building restrictions. You can name your own favourite thing that we need to do. This is why I would have preferred annual and not five-year targets, so that they were not sowing seeds for a future Government to reap. That is why I would have preferred the Secretary of State to outline in general and not binding terms broadly how he saw the annual target being met. I recognise some of the impracticalities. The real need is to recognise the essentially different interests of individual Governments and even individual Parliaments. The supervening realities against these unresolved paradoxes of co-operation lead me to believe that we have to be really careful about putting this legislation in place in a way that is even-handed in ensuring the strength of the appropriately constituted climate change committee, the Government—made appropriately immanent in the Secretary of State—and both Houses of Parliament. Much as I listened to the criticisms of the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, I am in favour of the broad spirit of the amendment. I think that the Committee probably is also, if it is appropriately done.