Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord May, has expressed a very important view. This is probably one of the most crucial amendments that we will look at on Report. So far, noble Lords have discussed it as if devolution did not exist. We keep doing that. We must remember that things have changed and that although we talk about cross-departmental decision-making, a number of the departments concerned have been devolved. Several of the departments which have had to agree to the measure are in Scotland, where the decisions will have to come through the First Minister, who with others will have to agree the target. We will come to that issue in Amendment No. 233, when my noble friend the Duke of Montrose and I will make a suggestion about how such agreement might be arrived at. If the Prime Minister was the person who had to report to Parliament, many of these problems would be reduced, because he is the Prime Minister of Scotland. The remit of the Secretary of State for Defra does not run in Scotland, where there is a separate department. A confusion is being concocted in the Bill, which means that it simply will not work. The Government should listen hard to this; I do not know if this amendment is the solution, but there must be one. It seems to me that, on the face of it, if the Prime Minister was the person who put the ideas forward in the House of Commons, with the agreement of the Secretary of State for Scotland in Cabinet, Defra and so on, that would help the matter, at least in terms of presentation. I hope that the Government will listen to this, but when I mentioned this problem in another context to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, his answer showed that the Government simply had not thought about it at all. He simply said, ““That’s devolution for you””. That is not an answer. This is a real problem and the Government should think very hard about it. I support the amendment.