Climate Change Bill [HL]

Amendment No. 183A also bears my name. I am grateful to the Government for bringing forward their adaptation and for recognising the importance of a range of bodies—both public and private—to prepare for dealing with the impacts of climate change. The summer floods, for example, showed how extreme some of the impacts increasingly will be. It would not be unfair to say that many bodies were not prepared during the summer floods for the simple impact of extreme weather that we are likely to see more of because of climate change. There have recently been even more floods and the lesson I have got from the past 10 days is how badly prepared our road and rail systems are. They are the first to go under as soon as there is any surplus water around. That must be taken into account by the operators of railways and providers of roads. There is a job to be done right now, which will become an increasingly large one. I am pleased that the Government tabled their amendments and I am grateful to the Minister for the letter he sent with the amendments explaining the intention behind them. I still think that there should be a duty on these very important providers of essential public services. The government amendments involve a two-part process. First, guidance will be given to all bodies described in the amendment on how to assess risks and make plans to adapt to them—a sort of exhortation process, giving guidance about what might be expected, but no requirement to comply. The Minister has already said that it includes a large range of bodies, so it is not as if you can have stout words with them one by one, explaining that it is a requirement. There will have to be something that is pretty explicit and clear. Secondly, if they do not do the right thing there is a provision for the Government to require the ones that are not doing very well to produce a report. The big worry I have is that without a clear duty they will not know that they are supposed to be doing something. How will they realise that there is an obligation laid on them; and how will the Minister know which ones are not doing very well and which are doing okay? There is no requirement necessarily for them to report on their activities. Perhaps we can come on to deal with that. The helpful letter the Minister sent states: "““We envisage that the Secretary of State will only require public authorities or statutory undertakers to report to him in areas that are critical to the UK’s ability to adapt and where information or evidence of progress is lacking””." Without a duty laid on them and without a requirement to report in some minimalist way, it is difficult to understand how the Minister would judge when progress was lacking across the huge range of bodies that he was talking about. In the background notes to the amendment, the Minister indicated how and on what evidence the decision to require a body to report would be taken. The evidence is in three chunks. One is the overall risk assessment across the nation, which I believe would be very broad brush and would not identify individual organisations that are not doing the right thing by adapting to climate change. The second is a little staggering because it is evidence for events, which is like saying, ““Let’s see which bodies screw up””, and then requiring the ones that screw up to report—I apologise for the unparliamentary language. It does not seem satisfactory that we wait for evidence of failure. The third is existing performance frameworks. I shall give just two examples. One example is the criteria by which local authorities report. The local authority performance indicators are very selective; local authorities can choose the ones on which they will report, although they will have to provide information on the full range. Another example is the utilities, such as electricity companies. Unless they are specifically required by the energy regulator to provide information that would allow a judgment to made about whether they are doing a decent job by climate change-proofing their systems, I am not sure how that judgment would be made. Under the government amendment, the Minister would be floundering to get the right sort of evidence to be able to tell which of the many, many bodies he would want to require a report from because he believed that they were not doing a good job of adapting to climate change. You could say that the Government are taking a light-touch, proportionate, risk-based approach by simply laying down the guidance, encouraging these bodies to do the right thing, getting broad information about whether they are doing so, asking them to report only if they feel that they are not doing enough, and then gradually tightening the ratchet on the bodies that are not doing enough. That is a bit slow. We are already seeing the impact of the sort of weather that climate change will bring, and if we wait for that rather leisurely process we might well find ourselves in three, four, five, six or 10 years still waiting for some of the big investment programmes that some of these important providers of public infrastructure will be required to put into place. If they do not get started now on those risk assessments, plans, investment programmes, programmes to deliver that investment and putting measures into place, we will find that we are lagging badly behind and that there will be impacts on people and the economy in this country. I ask the Minister whether there is a happy marriage between the amendments, because the very detailed requirements laid out for guidance on how risk assessments might be done and the process of reporting are extremely valuable. If the Minister is to have a sporting chance of getting action in time, he will need these bodies to have a duty now. If that could be built into his amendment, I would be very pleased.