Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, this is the Frankenstein amendment. I cast no reflection on the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, whose contributions to the debates in this House are always of high value. This evening has been no exception. It is a pity, given the lateness of the hour, that there are not more noble Lords here to listen to his eloquence. When I call this amendment the Frankenstein amendment I do so not only because it might frighten the noble Lord, given his aversion to executive powers, but because the amendment leads us to a place where, up until now, the Government have feared to tread. The amendment makes the Committee on Climate Change come alive with its own autonomous capacity to make recommendations where it sees fit. This seems to fit in with our overall approach to the Bill, which has been to empower the Committee on Climate Change to ensure that it is robustly independent and authoritative. At first glance, this might be even too far for our liking—that is, the Committee on Climate Change should be an authoritative and independent body but should not usurp the powers of the Government, in terms of the formulation of difficult details of policy or launching its own policy initiatives and agenda. The amendment makes the committee much more reasonable. It simply powers the committee to provide information for which it was not asked directly by the Secretary of State. This seems like a very sound idea. What comes immediately to mind would be breakthroughs in the scientific community—or indeed even in industry—which would be very important to the Secretary of State and might affect government policy in an oblique way. The Secretary of State might not be able entirely to appreciate the import of some of the more abstruse breakthroughs and it would be extremely beneficial to put the committee in a position in which it could pass on this information. Although that would not be its primary function, the committee is perfectly poised to be the conduit between the scientific world and the political world. Providing information and advice to the Secretary of State would enable him to make better informed decisions. We have to face the fact that, on these immensely complex matters, the Secretary of State might not even know when he should ask for advice. This is by no means a condemnation of politicians, but with the immense speed at which developments occur in this field it would be useful to give the committee this capacity to proffer its own advice. The Government would be hard-pressed to object to an amendment like this—it would seem that they would want the committee to be under the thumb of the Secretary of State if they reject it. It would be interesting to hear further from the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, of situations where he feels that empowering a committee in this way would have strengthened the position of the committees and bodies on which he has served in his long public life. He has proposed a particularly useful amendment this evening.