Climate Change Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 184: 184: Before Clause 56, insert the following new Clause— ““Large corporations (1) All public limited companies listed in the FTSE 350 during a financial year must in their statutory company report for that year include within their annual report a section reporting on their greenhouse gas emissions. (2) The report must include the company’s— (a) plan and strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, (b) greenhouse gas emissions for the financial year being reported, (c) equivalent figures for greenhouse gas emissions for the previous three years, and (d) estimate of emissions for the next three years of trading.”” The noble Lord said: This is a new area of the Bill that we want to introduce under the miscellaneous provisions. The Government would be pressing at an open door in terms of major corporations. We are not talking about small to medium-sized enterprises. The Bill could take the opportunity effectively to amend the Companies Act to ensure that the major listed plcs on the Stock Exchange were mandated as part of their annual reporting to report the situation on carbon emissions. I understand entirely that the amendment as we tabled it would probably be rather too detailed for the Bill. The amendment tabled by other noble Lords, including my noble friend Lady Northover, may be more appropriate, but we feel strongly that such reporting should be included. I refer particularly to a report that has been sent to many of us from the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and the FTSE itself, which from a survey that it undertook in 2007, Climate Change: UK Corporate Reporting, found that 80 per cent of recipients—major corporations—already included reports or policy statements on climate change. Beyond that, 57 per cent of companies disclosed short- or medium-term targets relating to carbon emissions. Much of that is already going on. We feel strongly that there should be a unified way of doing that. At the moment those corporations report in various different ways. We feel that there is a strong argument to have a proper accounting and reporting basis for this and that that would be a major way of pushing forward without further actual laws or regulations, but bringing into corporate reporting and the corporate sector their performance in terms of their own carbon footprint and supply change. I beg to move.