Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Woolmer. We are talking about something that operates like a carbon tax at consumer level, a CAT rather than a VAT. If you are going to do that you have to integrate it into the rest of the tax system. The feature of VAT is that it is a cascade tax in which you net off all the tax you paid at previous stages. With this arrangement we have no safeguard, so when you buy your litre of road fuel tax will already have been paid on it. On the subject of flights, we have passed an amendment bringing aviation within the scope of the ETS and so levying a charge on aviation. Are we then going to have something on top of that? It then has to be integrated into the social security system. I see no logic in paying my elderly mother-in-law a heating allowance and then requiring her to pay something on top of that. Conceptually, you could do all this at the consumer level, but what you cannot do is have hybrid systems. Why on earth does this need to come anywhere near this House? The Bill is for the longer term and it does not have to include everything we might possibly want to do over the next 50 years. There is plenty of time for people to develop the scheme, study it further, publish a White Paper, Green Paper or whatever, and then to come forward with legislation. I cannot understand why there needs to be anything at all which says whether you do it or not. There needs to be no mention whatever of this possibility. This possibility can arise by all sorts of other schemes in the course of the next 42 years and I think that is the way we should deal with it.