Climate Change Bill [HL]

In a general sense, I want to underline the argument made by my noble friend Lord Lea. A few amendments ago, the Minister chose the Oxford English Dictionary definition of adaptation by referring to ““modifying in the light of new circumstances””. That is a nice, gentle, Oxfordy way of describing it. These will be drastic changes. They might take some time and be differential in their impact, but the changes will be drastic over the period that this Bill envisages. They are changes in our lifestyle, the pattern of the economy, the nature of work, the balance of work and life and the pattern of consumption. All of those require us to face up to them in a similar way to the concentrated period to which my noble friend Lord Puttnam has just referred. They are not minor modifications; they are huge. In wartime—and in this sense, the equivalence referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, is quite correct—all the elements of civil society pulled together and the pain was at least assumed to be more or less equivalent across all levels of society. One of the phrases that we remember from wartime is the late Queen Mother’s remark that at last we can look the East End in the face. We will be in similar times over these kinds of adjustments. That will require the engagement of leaders of industry, business, commerce, trade unions and other parts of society—and indeed of consumer organisations, such as my own—to make their communications available in putting across the same message. I suspect the Government are not going to be too keen about the prescription put forward by my noble friend Lord Lea. It is a bit corporatist and not with the Zeitgeist. However, it is inevitable that we will have to find some new way to bring all the leaders of society into this battle. Going back to the previous amendment, it is not just the Secretary of State who will have to implement this, but all of us in any leadership capacity in any part of this nation. There ought to be some reflection of that in the Bill. The other aspect is that many measures that the Secretary of State—the Government—will introduce through trading schemes, taxation and so on, will have regressive impacts. I have made speeches in this House on that. We are paying too little attention to the regressive, social impact of some of the most obvious measures that we will have to adopt to meet the challenges of climate change. We will need compensatory measures and consensus on them. A forum and its bureaucracy are, perhaps, not the most obvious ways of doing it, but the spirit behind my noble friend’s amendment is important and deserves some reflection in this Bill and its proceedings.