Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, the answer may be yes, but I am doing my best to make sure that it is not carried in this place. We would like to have Royal Assent before the summer so that the climate change committee can get on with its work. The time this Bill spends in your Lordships’ House is fine as we wish to send it to the other place with as few problems in it as possible. That may be a problem—I do not know—but the decision is for your Lordships’ House, not for me or the Government. I want to assure the House that mechanisms exist in the machinery of government to ensure that people across government, including the Prime Minister, are involved in these decisions. The Cabinet takes responsibility for the Government’s climate change policies and objectives. It is done at the central level and that permeates throughout government to junior Ministers and civil servants who serve the Government. A sub-committee dedicated to the environment and energy issues is chaired by the Chancellor of the Exchequer—the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, made the point that financial issues could come to the fore for many years of this policy initiative—and the members of the committee include the Secretaries of State responsible for the environment, energy, transport, communities and local government. The committee has the Prime Minister’s authority to take collective decisions in this area, and if members of that committee cannot agree—as noble Lords who have been in government will know well—it will go to Cabinet and into the machinery at the centre of government. I am not putting this up to knock it down, but nobody is claiming that the Prime Minister can take on meaningful duties and responsibilities on a daily basis for every policy across government. That is not the issue being raised. The point is that he delegates to Secretaries of State. Secretaries of State can come and go at the behest of the Prime Minister. That is a fundamental part of how the Government function. I fall back only slightly on the fact that No. 10 is not a large department; No. 10 has the facility to use the departments of state if it so wishes; so I will not use the argument that I used in Committee, because I was not happy about it at the time. The precedents that have been raised are important. Some may remember that I was still in the other place at the time of the passage of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. I remember some of the debates in the other place, both in the House and in party meetings. The Prime Minister has a role in that legislation—there is no doubt about that—but he does not write the reports himself. There is an argument for not having the same model here. There are three important and independent bodies with national security roles that carry out supervisory functions, including writing reports. Those reports are laid before Parliament by the Prime Minister. They are those of the Interception Commissioner, the Chief Surveillance Commissioner and the Intelligence Services Commissioner. All related ministerial powers and functions are exercised personally at the Secretary of State level, as people well know, especially in this place, which is full of former Home Secretaries and Foreign Secretaries. The reason that the reports are laid before Parliament by the Prime Minister is that he has traditionally taken an overarching responsibility for national security, the No. 1 issue for the people of this country. They look to the Government to keep them secure. That is national security in its traditional, narrowly defined sense, and the Prime Minister has a role. The term ““national security”” might be more broadly used in certain circumstances to include defence and foreign affairs, but that is not the case in legislation. That is the point: we are making legislation. The courts have generally taken a narrow view, applying the term to fast-moving, specific situations that affect the nation as a whole. For example, banking is not viewed as an issue relating to national security; but an individual, large-scale forgery with potential to undermine confidence in banknotes could represent a threat to national security. So there are variations. Another pragmatic way in which the narrower term can be tested against the policy is whether the Security Service will be the lead organisation in dealing with it. If not, it is not generally regarded as an issue of national security. Although we acknowledge that climate change is a serious, long-term global threat—no one is arguing against that; it goes right across government and will affect how we will work and live as individuals in this country; it is incredibly important—it is difficult to see how it could be defined as national security in the legislative sense where the Prime Minister gets involved, as in the examples that I have given. The effects of climate change are unlikely to result in a sudden risk to the security of the entire nation. We can have severe weather events, but they have not resulted in catastrophe in that sense, and it is difficult to attribute individual events to climate change. People have mentioned that Defra is a relatively small department compared to some of the large departments of state. The implication is that it does not make sense to have the Defra Secretary of State in the lead. It may not always be like that, but allocating responsibility for sectoral emissions to certain Whitehall departments is very complex, as those who have worked in Whitehall know. We simply do not recognise the idea that Defra is therefore responsible for only a small part of our efforts to tackle climate change. We have responsibility for a large number of policy measures for reducing emissions. For instance, the department leads policy on the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, which caps about half of the United Kingdom's emissions and will shortly include aviation emissions. Defra leads on climate change agreements; the new carbon reduction commitment for business, with lower emissions intensity; and the carbon emission reduction target for energy suppliers, which will replace the energy efficiency commitment from 2008. There is direct responsibility for Defra, but no one is arguing that one department does it all. I am piloting the Bill through the House as the Defra Minister acting on behalf of my ministerial colleagues, but I am also doing it on behalf of the Government. All the other departments are signed up to the Bill. When I have been able to respond to some of the debates that have clearly gone beyond Defra, answers have come back not only from the Treasury but from other departments as well. This is a government Bill and a government-wide view. There is no reason why the Prime Minister should be written into the legislation in the way that has been suggested, and the precedents that have been given do not hold up the case. I therefore hope that the noble Lord will not press the amendment to a vote.