Amendment of the law

Those are important points, and we are going to have to weigh very carefully the carbon footprint of manufacture. Nothing can be made without a carbon impact—that would be like making an omelette without using eggs. That is the difficulty, and the question that we must resolve is how we make sure that the carbon gain of what we do outweighs the carbon cost. That is a terribly important consideration. My worry about the scrappage scheme is that it is very short term; it expires in 2010. It is cash-limited as well as time-limited, and it attaches no conditions to the nature of the replacement vehicle. We had a decade of voluntary agreements with the UK car manufacturing industry between 1997 and 2007, during which time the industry was supposed to reduce emissions from new cars manufactured to less than 140 g of carbon per kilometre. We got nowhere near delivery of that target. The successful schemes elsewhere on the continent contain conditionalities that require the replacement vehicle to emit less than, say, 100 g of carbon per kilometre. There are at least eight vehicles on sale in the UK that meet that standard. As I understand it, at least another six will become available this year. It is right to say that green measures will shift us to the consumption of things that tread more lightly on the planet, and away from the consumption of goods that tread heavily on the planet. However, there are no conditionalities built into the UK scrappage scheme proposals that would structurally move us to where we need to be within the next two to three years. With green measures, I always think that the most important thing to do is to translate the notion of green or ecology into practical, tangible jobs. Without a doubt, the leader in that field internationally is South Korea. Its stimulus package is around £30 billion, 81 per cent. of which—£23 billion—is to go on green measures. It has set itself some very specific targets. Not all of them will be earth-changing, but they mobilise huge numbers of people. For instance, it is a commitment of the South Korean Government that the lighting in every single public building in South Korea will be changed to light-emitting diode valves this year. More than 1 million light bulbs and light fittings will have to be changed. Every one of those fittings will have to be changed by people who are capable of carrying out the electrical installation. People will also have to manufacture the bulbs. That shift will deliver both jobs and a dramatic reduction in the carbon consumption of all public buildings, and the commitment is that it will take place this year. South Korea has also made a commitment to build within the next four years 1 million eco-homes, and a further 1 million existing houses will be refurbished to low-carbon standards. The number of jobs involved in that process is massive. South Korea is using directed public investment, channelled through private providers in the construction and contracting sector, to deliver both economic and ecological transformation. It has a quantitative target for delivering change. My experience of trying to do similar work in countries in other parts of the EU shows that wherever a country runs those practical, targeted programmes, today's unemployed, and particularly today's young unemployed, are desperate to be part of it. They want to be part of the solution to today's problem, rather than be defined as today's problem. We have to address their aspirations in the context of the practical jobs that such a green transformation would bring. I was pleased to see in the Government's proposals an extension of the low-carbon buildings programme. It is a small measure—a commitment of £45 million to extend the programme beyond its expiry date of June this year. The reason why I focus on that is that, although our Government are committed to introducing feed-in tariffs for renewable energy into the UK energy market hopefully by the end of this year or by the beginning of next, almost all the renewable energy sector was saying to us that unless there was a bridge between the end of the low-carbon buildings programme in June and the start of the feed-in tariff regime at the beginning of next year, the bulk of the industry would die. The reality would then have been that, by the time our Government got round to introducing the feed-in tariff regime, the only suppliers catering for and responding to the regime would have been outside the UK. It is a therefore a huge "small" relief. The industry that we have, which has survived despite rather than because of Government policy, will at least still be in existence when we produce the real stimulus to shift us to renewable and sustainable energy systems. To do that, however, we needed bigger measures in the Budget. At least £100 billion ought to have been allocated to the creation of a green infrastructure bank. Some of the moneys raised from the tax changes that I mentioned earlier could have been used. More importantly, we need to understand that we are currently putting about £50 billion a year into UK pension funds. The difficulty is that those funds are still circulating in pursuit of short-term returns within a speculative and almost paranoic global financial market. We need to give people the capacity to invest in their own ecological future and their own pension security. A green infrastructure bank, underpinned by that sort of funding, would be an essential part of the transformational shift that we must make. I mentioned the shift into feed-in tariffs by the end of the year. Some Members of the House may be aware that, somewhat belatedly in my parliamentary career, I have been appointed Government special adviser on the introduction of feed-in tariffs.