Climate Change Bill [HL]

I support what I believe are probing amendments at this stage, but I very much support the feeling behind the previous amendments. I understand the Minister’s difficulty: this is a new committee that will be meeting an objective that has not been set in political terms before, and there will be a range of vastly different views about how it should be set up. The Secretary of State will say that they picked the numbers and that any further changes will be almost as random as the original numbers. There is a case for increasing the number of committee members. I have a slight issue with the selection of committee members from the Royal Society. It is an eminent body that has done an enormous amount of work in the area—I know that many noble Lords have been to its debates on climate change—but the world of science is multifaceted and there are areas that might not be represented by the membership of the Royal Society. The role of political interference needs to be looked at. The membership of the committee, even though it is advisory, will affect vastly different areas within the business and social community. We need only look at the debate on the role of Heathrow at our previous sitting to realise that that will be the case. There might be a call for a member of the CBI to be one of the committee members; that would have its own consequences—maybe positive, maybe negative. I know that the Minister will set out the reasoning on why some of these amendments will not meet his favour, but I hope that he can give one assurance. Most of the amendments are to sub-paragraph (1). However, Paragraph 1(6) of the schedule states: "““Any such order is subject to negative resolution procedure””." It is very tempting to table an amendment stating that there should be an affirmative procedure. I hope that, if the Government are to reject the amendments, this is an ongoing process that is to be looked at regularly. Although I would not table an amendment saying that there should be an affirmative resolution, I very much hope that, because of the unique nature of the committee, the Minister will commit at this stage that, on the first occasion when the negative resolution could be debated, the Government will make time for a debate about the membership of the committee. This is not the only Climate Change Bill that we will ever debate; I believe that we will come back to the subject extremely regularly. If the Government could give the assurance that government time may be made available to debate the membership of the committee, some of the concerns that we have set out in the amendments could be met.