Climate Change Bill [HL]

I shall probably embarrass the noble Lord, Lord Woolmer, by agreeing with him again in this area. I will have a great concern if the Committee on Climate Change starts making major policy recommendations to government. That would be the opposite of what the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, wants: it would not depoliticise the decisions but would utterly politicise the Committee on Climate Change. It would be like many other bodies, such as the Sustainable Transport Commission, which are very important and have many important people on them, but they make all kinds of recommendations and are therefore seen as part of the political scenery and not as part of the scientific scenery. There is also confusion—perhaps not on the part of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, but within the Committee—and later in the Bill we will discuss the Committee on Climate Change itself. In one of the sections there is a call for an annual report. We on these Benches want to see in the Bill not only that annual report but a requirement for the Committee on Climate Change to go as far as to judge whether present government policies are likely to meet their own targets. It should have that important role but it should not be allowed to go as far as to then say, ““But, Secretary of State, you should be doing this””. The moment that happens it becomes a political organisation and not a scientific organisation. You could argue that in another way if all scientists had the same view about things, but they do not. The whole point about science is that there are peer reviews and all kinds of differing opinions and there then tends to be a consensus about a particular subject. We can see this in climate change science at the moment. I am worried about the proposal to move the Committee on Climate Change into, effectively, a political lobbying organisation, which the amendment would do. We shall come to one of our amendments later in the Bill. The Committee on Climate Change must have a greater ability than being only the accounting organisation described in the Bill, but the furthest it should go is to assess government policy and whether it will strategically meet its targets, state that openly and objectively, and then it will be up to government to respond and be responsible to Parliament for that response. I genuinely think this is a dangerous amendment in terms of the politicisation of the Committee on Climate Change.