Climate Change Bill [HL]

In the case put by the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, I hope that the answer will be no. My caveat is that, if the pilot in that example covered only part of the local authority area, you would not envisage it going on for ever, however successful it was, because then you would have two tiers in that area. The pilot would have to close so that there could be a rollout. I cannot go beyond that. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, picks up a good point. We have never said this, but it is not the case that the reports and evaluations of all five pilots have to be in before a decision is made. However, I want to make it absolutely clear that, although the trigger mechanism is not necessarily with Parliament once the legislation is in force, the Secretary of State has to come back to Parliament to report on at least one of the pilots before any rollout can take place. This cannot be done just by getting the Bill on the statute book, going away, chatting to the local authorities and rolling out the five pilots without coming back to Parliament. Before any action is taken on a rollout, at least one of the pilots has to be reported on to Parliament. That is an extreme case, but once we have the results from three or four of the pilots we may have found a way forward. I do not know—this is not my day job—whether we are envisaging the same thing all over the country; I suspect not, because things are not the same now. The amendment is about the pilots all running at the same time regardless of what the individual local authorities want. We need flexibility for local government. In practice, some authorities may want to run the pilot on a council tax year and some may want to run it on a calendar year. Others—this is the example that I have here—may want to introduce a new service in their area, such as a food waste collection service, and will think, ““We can link this with the pilot, as it is a change of circumstance overall””. The timing of the start of the pilots must be up to the local authorities, albeit within reason—if there are five good ones that tick all the boxes, we would go ahead without waiting for the sixth one where the local authority said that it wanted to do it at another date. That is the reality there; that is why flexibility is needed on the timing of the pilots. It would not be practical or sensible to have them all starting and finishing on the same date. We would not envisage a pilot running for less than a year. Whether it is the calendar year of the council tax year, I do not know. That is up to local authorities. You would want to go through the annual—the seasonal—cycle. I suspect that waste collection has a seasonal cycle to it, like a lot of other things, for reasons that we can all understand. So it would probably be for not less than a year, but I cannot say that it would be for not more than so many years. We want local government to come to us for that. However, the pilots will not be open-ended. Clause 52(3) states that they will be limited by the designation, but the designation will be as a result of local government coming in with an idea for a pilot in the first place. Once the period is over, the powers will cease to exist for the authority and we would not be able to extend it. In practice, we would want to wait for the best evidence for a rollout, so we are likely to wait for reports on more than one pilot, but I agree that, the way that the Bill is drafted at present, it allows it after one. We may want to come back to that issue. The noble Lord asked whether there is a cut-off point after which no pilots can run. The answer is no, because we are in the hands of the local authorities. It will be up to them to come forward with schemes that run for the amount of time they think fits their circumstances, but they will have to have an end date, which prevents there being an unnecessary length of time. Those are quite legitimate questions, but I am simply not in a position to answer. All that I can say is that the nature of the flexibility that local authorities may require is covered in the Bill. We will have had to take cognisance of that when they come forward with their business plans and their waste collection plans.