Climate Change Bill [HL]

I know that my noble friend has already agreed to consider an amendment similar to Amendment No. 183ZF, but I am not sure that he agreed to consider one similar to the others. Therefore, I shall take a little time to go through my note in the hope that I shall be able to help the noble Lord so that he can withdraw the amendment this evening. After reporting back to Parliament on the pilots, we might wish to take one of three possible courses of action. First, if the pilots are successful, we may want simply to enable all English authorities to introduce a waste-reduction scheme, or we may first wish to revise the provisions in the light of lessons learnt during the piloting phase before rolling out the powers to all authorities. Finally, if we consider that the pilots have not been successful, we may wish to repeal the powers so that authorities cannot run the schemes. As I have said, the key point is to report back to Parliament when we have good quality evidence from the pilots; indeed, we have just had a detailed debate about when that might be. This is more important than needing to report back on each and every one of the pilots before we can submit proposals to roll out the powers more widely. We recognise the need to get Parliament’s consent to any amendment or repeal of the provisions. Therefore, our ability to amend or repeal would be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure. Following a recommendation by the Delegated Powers Committee, we have also decided that subordinate legislation that the Secretary of State makes under amendments to the waste reduction provisions should be subject to some parliamentary procedure. We would need to decide case by case which procedure would be most appropriate according to the nature of the subordinate legislation that we are proposing. We do not want to waste Parliament’s time on minor technical details. As with Amendment No. 183ZEA, which we covered in the last group, the intention behind Amendment No. 183ZF seems to be to require the Secretary of State to report on all the pilots. My noble friend has already said that he will consider that. On the last point made by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, the most important point that I am trying to make is that the Government propose to accept the recommendation of the Delegated Powers Committee that any such subordinate legislation that comes out of the reporting process and any changes that need to be made would be subject to a parliamentary procedure, depending on the size of the change that we make. If the amendment is consequential, it would be a very small matter, which would be dealt with proportionately. We do, however, accept the Delegated Powers Committee’s recommendations. With that rather rambling submission and given that we are already considering my noble friend’s suggestion to look at parliamentary reporting, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.