Climate Change Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the last two noble Lords who spoke because they represented the Government’s thinking on this matter. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, that he has done the Committee a service by raising the issue, as did the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, with his previous amendment. We will certainly look at whether more detail should be provided than is currently provided for in Clause 11. I assure the noble Lords that their thinking is very much the Government’s thinking on this. Perhaps I may deal first with the extraneous matter. I had a wonderful experience over the weekend watching that great film ““The Kite Runner””, but I did not think that I would be involved in flying kites this afternoon. My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours has flown one of the more obvious kites and I will neither cut it down nor respond to it except to say, as the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, said, that the safest position to adopt is to point out that this is nothing to do with the Government or with this place but is for the other place. My noble friend is always ingenious. He has tagged his proposal on to this amendment and he deserves a response. I can only assure my noble friend that both Ministers on this Bench, particularly the senior one, were alert and listened carefully to what he said. He has firmly registered the point with the Government and we will see what needs to be done. However, I am with him on the point that the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, indicated in his contribution. We all recognise that Parliament has a very important role to play in this and it would be helpful if considerable thought was paid to the mechanisms by which that is done. I am grateful to my noble friend for his kite-flying. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, that the report required under Clause 11 will already have high status. As it will set out the proposals and policies that the Government intend to implement on carbon budgets, it is an important report. However, I am not clear that calling the report a strategy or requiring that it contain measures in addition to proposals and policies will change its nature very much. There is also the obvious problem that calling it a ““climate change strategy”” could be somewhat misleading. After all, this report will be concerned only with mitigation—measures to reduce emissions. It will not cover the crucial issue of adaptation to climate change. That is the subject of Clause 49 which appears later in the Bill. Although the Government are not oblivious to the important points which the noble Lord makes about the necessity for strategy, this is not the appropriate clause for it because this report is more narrowly defined to deal with the more narrowly defined issues. The noble Lord has raised an important topic and we will have a chance to discuss it much more fully when we reach Clause 49. As he will also recognise in my response to the noble Lords, Lord Oxburgh and Lord Jay, our minds are very far from closed on the level of detail required. On that basis, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.