Climate Change Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 50: 50: Clause 10, page 5, line 40, after ““decision”” insert ““, whether positive or negative,”” The noble Lord said: I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 51 to 55 but I want to talk primarily about Amendment No. 53. In many ways, this matter goes back over some of the ground that we have just discussed and, in retrospect, it may have been better to put some of these amendments in the previous group. However, although I would have supported Amendment No. 48 in principle, I do not believe that it was worded strongly enough to deal with the list of matters that have to be taken into account. I shall not go through the whole debate again but I agree entirely with the noble Duke’s summing up of subsection (3). You can have a general catch-all clause at the end but a committee as important as this will always look back at its terms of reference to ensure that particular items have been taken into consideration. It might also consider others but they will not be given the same priority. I feel very strongly that a key area that has been left out here—in a way, it is the raison d’être of the whole Bill—is the much broader environmental question, not least biodiversity. It is an area that does not receive the degree of interest outside the scientific press that it deserves, but there are real issues concerning biodiversity—not only those of nature conservation but questions relating to crops, the way we live and the health of our national economy. That is why we believe it is essential that environmental circumstances, biodiversity, ecosystems and ecology generally should be included in the list of matters set out in the clause. As the Bill stands, they have been left out completely and that is a major omission. They have to be a part of the list because, although we have the catch-all clause, they come under an area that the committee needs to consider in particular.