Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I, too, find the clause incoherent and the logic of the amendment compelling. Instead of imposing a duty to ensure that the nation reaches its target by 2050, it creates a separate objective and a duty to deliver everything that will make the objective possible. It is more sensible to attach the duty and accountability to the things that the Secretary of State does than to the way in which society responds to those things. The test becomes whether the Secretary of State, by action or omission, could be deemed to have behaved reasonably in relation to the objective in force. That could be in relation to the things that Secretaries of State do: they legislate, impose taxes and negotiate treaties, and they should be held responsible for those things. The amendment’s merit is that you would attach the duty to the things that Ministers did, such as authorising a suite of coal-fired power stations without a legal requirement that they should have carbon capture and storage or reducing the caps under the various trading schemes when we were behind schedule. The Conservative Benches have an in-house constitutional expert in the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. I found his criticisms of the clause and his evidence to the pre-legislative scrutiny committee compelling. That is why we need to look at this again. As a former head of the Civil Service, I do not agree with the Minister’s comments about the purpose being to make civil servants do something. Civil servants serve the Ministers of the day. Either that is binding on Ministers and civil servants or it is binding on neither. You cannot say that you are doing it to bind one and not the other. We should proceed along the lines put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness.