Climate Change Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 143: 143: Clause 27, page 14, line 12, at end insert— ““( ) whether targets for the net UK carbon account will be met through the carbon budget,”” The noble Lord said: The Minister has saved me from having to declare an interest as a potential member of the climate change committee. I shall be interested to see all those Cross Benchers who turn up with particularly eloquent speeches for the first round of interviews. We should remember that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, is the only person who definitely cannot stand because he is also an MSP. In moving the amendment, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 145 and 151. It comes back to the heart of the matter of what the climate change committee is about and to some of the areas that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, talked about earlier. It is certainly the view from these Benches that the committee’s role has to be strengthened. One of the things that we were surprised about when the Bill was published after the work of the Joint Committee was that the role of climate change committee seemed to go backwards. In my view, what this committee does, with great diligence and expertise, is assess all those areas we have talked about, set the five-year budgets for three terms ahead and look to see whether they are being met—and not a lot more. We do not believe that the climate change committee should not become politicised. Therefore, we do not believe that it should be the instrument for delivering policy. That is the area where we perhaps disagree with some of the other amendments. What we believe fundamentally is that it is a vital role of the climate change committee not just to measure and set targets with Government, but to judge and audit. In these amendments we are saying that it must be a role and a duty—perhaps one of its most important functions—of the committee to look at the targets that have been set through its own work and judge whether government policies are likely to meet those targets. From that point of view, going back to the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, at the beginning of the debate today, it is a little like the Audit Commission looking at the work and the policies of the Government and asking whether the current trajectory is going to be met by them. It does not then suggest what those policies should be instead. That is the political judgment made by a Government accountable to Parliament. We strongly believe that that must be the major role of the climate change committee and that it will hugely increase its importance and relevance if it is able to judge whether the Government are likely to meet those targets and to be full in its reporting. I beg to move.