Climate Change Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 158A: 158A: Clause 28, page 15, line 13, leave out ““30th June”” and insert ““31st August”” The noble Lord said: I shall speak first to Amendment No. 158A and then to Amendment No. 159 with which it is grouped. This section relates to the duty of the committee with regard to its annual reports. It makes special mention of its report in the second year after the end of a budgetary period. That will have to take account of the final statement from the Secretary of State who, under Section 14, will have had five months—until 31 May—to produce it. If we assume that, in any year where 31 May is a Saturday, a Sunday or a Bank Holiday Monday, the Secretary of State will have completed his report beforehand and the committee will have had between 20 and 22 days in which to produce the section reviewing the progress that has just been summarised by the Secretary of State. That reflects five years of a budgetary period. Obviously, one hopes that the committee and the Secretary of State will have a good working relationship and will, consequently, be generally aware of each other's relative position. That will not, however, necessarily be adequate to allow, in four weeks, a full appreciation of the Secretary of State’s justification for the work of the preceding five-year budgetary period. Should the Secretary of State be unable to complete his report until, let us say, 1 or 2 June, the time available to the committee will be reduced by 5 or 10 per cent. There can very quickly be a significant erosion of the time to deliberate properly. As things stand, the Secretary of State will receive the report of the committee on or before 30 June and will then have three and a half months in which to draft his response, and discuss it with the other national authorities, prior to laying it before Parliament not later than 15 October. It seems to us that the balance on these dates is not quite right and that the committee should be given adequate time in which to evaluate the Secretary of State’s assessment of each budgetary period. In our view such an evaluation is likely, every five years, to take considerably longer than the four weeks allowed in the Bill. Turning to Amendment No. 159, having just expressed our concern that the committee is not being given sufficient reporting time in the years where they have to include a commentary on the outcome of the preceding budgetary period, it would appear that the Government share our anxiety and are prepared in principle to allow the committee extra time in which to complete its statutory duties. Unfortunately, the wording in the Bill does not specify any circumstances in which that leeway will be applied. Our concern is that the only cause for extending the committee’s reporting period will be where the Secretary of State is unable to meet his statutory time limit and the committee will find itself at the end of each five-year budgetary period with a scant four weeks in which to assimilate the final figures, assess their meaning, review the measures that gave rise to them and evaluate the outcomes. Few assemblies could contain a greater collective knowledge of the ways committees function than your Lordships’ House, but experience tells me that if the secretariat can do all of the analysis and suggest a commentary that appears to all committee members to be logical, comprehensive and positive there will be little need of many meetings or further research. If, however, the situation is not so clear—if there is a range of opinion among the members of the committee or if the results to be assessed are not more or less as expected or desired—there may be a need for several meetings with a fair amount of preparation in between. In such circumstances, the final wording is also often seen as being critical. At such times, the four weeks allowed to the committee would be impossibly constraining. Our view is that this section, as it stands, is likely to lead to unnecessary stress and missed deadlines. I beg to move.