Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I have listened with some care to what the Minister said because this is a difficult technical issue. I appreciate his difficulty in that we cannot have a concordat on the Bill until we have the Bill. Equally, it is difficult for us in drafting the Bill to know what we have to put into it until we know the contents of the concordat. There is an awful danger that we will start to go round in a whirlpool and get nowhere and that is the last thing that we want to happen. I can give my noble friend one marginal assurance. He asked a very similar question to mine at the end of Committee. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, answered as best she could at the time about how all the Ministers in Scotland in particular would work together with the other devolved Administrations and the Secretary of State. Although she gave as competent an answer as she could, subsequently, one of the officials came across and said that the answer lay in the devolution Bills and quoted the relevant paragraphs. I am somewhat surprised that they did not put that into the Minister’s brief tonight. It still leaves us with a dilemma. Will the Minister assure us that the concordat, when it is finally arrived at, will contain sufficient requirements to report the actual details of the carbon budget for Scotland, so that the Secretary of State will have enough information to provide a sufficiently accurate carbon statement budget when he has to do so? Without that assurance we are in great difficulty.