Climate Change Bill [HL]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for that useful explanation. I will go back through that before Report stage. I wonder whether we are talking about similar things, even though I am sure that there are differences. The National Audit Office is very useful, in that we on these Benches see a stronger role for the Committee on Climate Change than is in the Bill at the moment. We will, I hope, come to this amendment later this afternoon. The Committee on Climate Change should have a very positive role in auditing, assessing and judging the policies of the Government in meeting the budgets and targets that it has set itself. In that area, the Committee on Climate Change has a huge responsibility, one that is not in the Bill at the moment. The noble Lord will know all this far better than me, given his deeper experience. The National Audit Office would not, therefore, take forward something in, for example, education, saying which policies are needed, and that we should go 100 per cent down the route of academies, or whatever. However, I do not see that as coming within the body’s role. It assesses what is going on, the areas of value and all those other areas where it might well disagree with government. In the end that has to be resolved. These Benches agree with that and may come back to that debate later this afternoon. As regards the amendment, we have thought long and hard about this area. We fully agree with the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, about the need to strengthen the climate change committee in all sorts of ways. I regard the name issue slightly more subjectively and do not reject his analysis of the derivation of the word ““commission”” and the various rights that that normally confers. Over the weekend I put ““commission”” into Google, which came up with the Forestry Commission, the Gambling Commission, the Sustainable Development Commission, the Human Genetics Commission, the Low Pay Commission—noble Lords could probably do with its help occasionally—the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the Electoral Commission. One could compare the gravitas and fear of government that those bodies induce with that induced by the Monetary Policy Committee; I know which one has real power within the nation state of the United Kingdom—the Monetary Policy Committee has far more power than the others. It has a different style of governance to many of the commissions that I mentioned although they are extremely varied in that respect. Nevertheless, I consider that the Monetary Policy Committee has the most power, and certainly the most authority, of the bodies that I listed. The electoral—