Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, it falls to me to speak to the amendment. I remind the noble Baroness that in almost exactly two weeks’ time we will be experiencing daylight saving in the UK, as happens every year. I think that she is asking that the clock should not be put back to Greenwich Mean Time in the winter. Here we enter an area where many Scots might like to think about increasing the definition of the line that crosses between Berwick and Carlisle. I am not sure that this is proper but perhaps I can put a little conundrum to your Lordships. If you are trying to progress as the crow flies between Carlisle and Edinburgh, do you envisage yourself moving a bit to the east or a bit to the west? That is the sort of question that you put to secondary school students. The answer is that Edinburgh is to the west of Carlisle and the majority of Scotland is to the west of that line. So not only is it further north, but it is further west, which affects the rising and setting times of the sun. Where I live, in winter time, it begins to get light at about 8 o’clock and we are used to getting darkness at about 4.30. We are not terribly keen on the idea of it getting light only at about 9 o’clock in the morning in the winter time. As the noble Baroness said, this proposal has already been covered many times in different guises in the House. In the many debates, it always seems to fail to gain enough support. I am willing to inform the House that it does not have my support now as it comes back again. As far as I understand it, there is enough power in the Bill for the Committee on Climate Change to consider the issue if it wants—it has a very broad remit—but I am not desperately in favour of putting it to the committee as a special case. The amendment goes only so far as to allow for a change in daylight saving schemes to be considered, but we feel that even to make that definite emphasis is going too far. This sort of amendment is characterised as a way of making evenings lighter; some of us see it simply as a way to make mornings darker. Postmen, farmers and construction workers depend on early light. People often talk about schoolchildren. One thing that we are trying to do at the moment is to get schoolchildren to walk to school. Their parents will never let them walk to school if it is pitch dark. As the noble Baroness told us, the experiment was tried and abandoned for what I think were perfectly good reasons. The statistics gathered for the experiment between 1968 and 1971 showed a decrease in the number of people killed or seriously injured because of the shift in the clocks, but those statistics are skewed because they do not seem to account for the fact that drink-driving laws had not yet come into effect. In any case, we do not feel that individual proposals for the reduction of carbon emissions have a place in this framework Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to set up mechanisms to introduce policy that will decrease climate change. Even those who feel that it is a good idea should object to the amendment on the grounds that the Bill should not be too prescriptive on policy to be implemented to stop climate change.