Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, the noble Lord is quite right that I was sympathetic. Yet even where I have made no commitment to look into an issue, we have had the best brains in Whitehall looking seriously at what your Lordships have been saying because, as I constantly remind my ministerial colleagues, the Government do not run the Lords, so we have to listen. I also explained that in a letter that I sent. I also said in Committee that the idea of a compatibility test would have a limited practical effect, and that it would be difficult if not impossible ever to demonstrate that a single act of legislation was, on its own, incompatible with the aims of the Bill. Even if particular legislation would lead to an increase in emissions, that would not in itself be incompatible with the 2050 target, as there would be nothing to stop compensatory action being taken in another area to reduce emissions. In practice, then, we could honestly say that every piece of legislation was, if looked at in isolation, compatible with the aims of the Bill. This has been looked at very carefully, and therefore the amendment would achieve nothing at all. As I said in Committee, we agree that an important point—about making sure that we take account of the full range of government policies—underlies the amendment. As I emphasised earlier, this is across the Government and not just Defra. The full range includes those that might put up emissions as well as those that might bring them down. As I said in my letter covering the Government’s amendments, there are already robust processes in place within government to ensure that the carbon impacts of policies are assessed at every stage of their development process. That is important as legislation is often made toward the end of policy development, so a test applied only at that stage would not, in itself, achieve much. We have looked further since being in Committee. I can assure the House that the Government are committed to amending the guidance on Explanatory Notes that accompany primary legislation. That change will require the section of the Explanatory Notes covering the impact assessment to refer specifically to the more detailed carbon impact assessment carried out for that legislation. By explicitly detailing each policy’s carbon impact in the overall cost-benefit analysis and, where applicable, the package of parliamentary documents, we should be able to signal the carbon impact of the policy to as wide an audience as possible. I hope that the new change to the Explanatory Notes, which has come about following our debates in Committee, provides sufficient reassurance about the robustness of the existing mechanism to assess the carbon impacts of policies—not just legislation—so I am grateful to noble Lords for bringing this up. I hope that with the spirit having been there in Committee, as I indicated then, bringing this about in practice with such a change to the Explanatory Notes will go some way to showing that we have, first, listened and, secondly, done something practical about it.