Climate Change Bill [HL]

I wonder whether I could suggest a way forward, as I have probably managed to insert more sustainable development duties into Bills as they proceed than any other Peer in the land. For the past 10 years, any time I have spotted a Bill when someone ought to have a duty for sustainable development, we have tried to include it. Latterly the Government have been excellent in forestalling that by putting in those duties in a variety of settings. It is important to set the climate change activity in this broader context of sustainable development. Climate change is an important and urgent issue, which will become even more important and urgent as it bites. The risk at the moment is that it can be seen as trumping all other considerations. The noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, referred to the debate on the Severn barrage. I hesitate to summarise what the Minister said on that day in a rather crass way. It was as if that amount of renewable energy justified any environmental damage by way of collateral damage, as it were. Though the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, said that no one in their right mind would propose a power station that damaged biodiversity, I hate to say that the Government are now spending tens of millions on feasibility studies on the Severn barrage to do just that. We have to get clarity on where the climate change effort needs to take place in that setting of sustainable development. This may not be the right amendment. It is open to being hijacked, as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and others say. The solution to this is to insert a sustainable development requirement, as indeed we have done in many Bills for many functions and for many public bodies in the past, but never for the Government as a whole as this Bill would require. The Minister may leap to his feet and pull a Bill out of his back pocket of which I am unaware that lays a sustainable development duty on the Government that would apply in this circumstance. If that is the case, I am even more joyful about the last 10 years; but I suspect that he will not. Simply to say that the reporting required by the Government in this clause should be required to take account of sustainable development—the broad wording in many Bills—would help to make sure of it, and provide a gentle prompt to government over many years about the fact that, no matter how pressing climate change becomes, if we solve it by creating other environmental, social or economic problems, we simply will not hit the mark.