Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, in the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, I support this amendment. I did not take any part in the lengthy proceedings in Committee and I do so now to make one short point only. I say at once that I do not like the drafting of Clause 1. In my view—this was said by others in Committee—it is meaningless to impose a duty on the Secretary of State that cannot be enforced. By way of contrast, many noble Lords present will remember the duty imposed on the Lord Chancellor under the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, under which he is obliged to protect the independence of the judges. That duty is unobjectionable. If, for example, the Government were to attempt to oust judicial review—as they did in one of the many Bills dealing with applications for asylum—they could, on the face of it, be in breach of that duty and the question could then be tested by way of judicial review. Clause 1 of this Bill is quite different. It could not be said that the Secretary of State who happens to be in office in 2050 was in breach of the duty imposed by Clause 1 until the very last moment of 2050, by which time it would be far too late for anybody to do anything about it. In the mean time, there is nothing that anybody can do—and certainly nothing on which the courts could possibly adjudicate. That applies to all Secretaries of State between now and then. So Clause 1 is what Roman law—it is a very long time since I studied Roman law—called lex imperfecta. It has no force and it has no place in this Bill. There could, of course, be no objection to stating a target figure in the Bill to give meaning to government Amendment No. 50, to which we shall come in due course. But to express it in the form of a duty is, as I say, meaningless and wrong. So whether we agree with Amendment No. 2 proposed by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, or with Amendment No. 50, I hope that we shall get rid of Clause 1 as it stands. I have one other point. From what was said by the Minister in Committee, I gather that the real purpose of Clause 1 is, as the noble Earl observed, to give a wake-up call to the Civil Service. One could have no objection to that, but surely there must be other ways of achieving that desirable objective without putting something on the statute book the like of which I have never seen.