Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I will do my best to satisfy the noble Lord on Amendment No. 226A. I understand his desire to ensure that the rollout is fully thought through, but I do not agree that the amendment would be the right way to do it, particularly given the benefit to local authorities of being able to respond to the pilots in a timely fashion. We may have enough evidence to proceed to rollout before three months after the last report is laid. If we do, we would be doing local authorities a disservice by holding back the powers. Again, as my noble friend put it more politely, getting fixated at this stage on timetables and dates is not helpful to anyone. It is not helpful to local government. It fails to recognise the situation on the ground and to appreciate that we in government are quite serious about ensuring that we will take a decision on rollout only when we feel that we have collected enough good quality evidence from the pilots. This has to be sold to the public, after all. Admittedly we want to move quickly—we make no apology for that—but we want to move in the right direction, so we will not rush decisions based on partial evidence. That is an important point. It is not possible to be absolutely precise at this point about the actual timetables.