Consumer Emissions (Climate Change) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support the Bill, and most particularly the direction that it takes. It is not a step change but it is an important incremental development on the existing measure that this House put through a little over a year ago. I happen to believe that if we are to meet our eventual 2050 targets, we will have to embrace the concept of personal carbon budgets or personal carbon credits. Although I am not sure that I will live to see them, I have no doubt whatever that this House will pass a Bill at some point to make that a fact of all our lives. We had an excellent debate yesterday on Copenhagen. I think what the outcome at Copenhagen tells us is that a comparative failure at international level puts a lot more pressure on both the local and the individual commitment to carbon reduction. It also puts more pressure on the quality, transparency and accuracy of reporting. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has just referred to that. When you alter the criteria for success in a situation like this, you can change the outcome quite radically, and often for the better. Let me offer an example of this, which may sound a little odd although I do not think that it really is. The Olympic medal table will be much discussed in 2012. The present use of gold, silver and bronze as the sole criterion of national success is very manipulable. Noble Lords will remember that there was quite a hoo-hah between ourselves and the Australians over who came fourth in Beijing. The dispute is very simple in its origin: if you apply five points to a gold, three to a silver and one to a bronze, you get a different result than if you apply three, two and one. That is not a good place to be for the Olympics and it certainly would not be a good place for the collection of information on carbon savings. I have recommended the following to the IOC. It should look more closely at the personal best achieved by each competitor at the Olympic Games. In the end, what counts for an athlete is their personal best. You cannot ask for more from an athlete on the day than that they deliver a personal best. If you make an accounting of the personal bests, you might get a very different competitive table. You might well find that Costa Rica is the most successful country, or Honduras or Saudi Arabia. You would get a very different table. That would establish which nation was making the most progress in the field of athletics and it would be a very important and interesting indicator. That is why I think this Bill offers a direction in which we begin to unwind and look at things in a more radical, in one sense, but also more sensible way. I wish to offer two examples of what is happening that illustrate why the direction the Bill takes is important. One is from schools and one from communities. Ofsted produced a report in May 2008, from which I shall cite just two lines. It states, ""most of the schools visited had limited knowledge of sustainability and work in this area tended to be uncoordinated, often confined to special events rather than being an integral part of the curriculum"." Two years after the report was published, we find that secondary school teachers know nothing of the Sustainable Schools and the Eight Doorways agenda. Surely we need a form of reporting that makes it impossible for a school not to be able to announce—and, indeed, celebrate—its carbon savings. We do not have that at present. Another example lies within communities. I touched on this briefly in yesterday's debate, but it is worth saying a little more. On Wednesday this week, the residents of the small Hebridean island of Eigg won part of a £1 million green energy price after building their own renewable electricity grid and slashing their carbon emissions by a third in a year. An article in the Guardian goes on to explain exactly what they were dealing with several years ago and how they succeeded in tackling that crisis. Another small community energy and transport project in the Brecon Beacons cut CO2 emissions in 155 homes and four community buildings by 20 per cent in a year, while an energy efficiency project run by volunteers in Shropshire cut CO2 outputs from 460 homes by 10 per cent. These schemes may be tiny, but they are tiny triumphs. Unless, as quickly as possible, we find our way to a measurement system that celebrates and allows individual communities and individuals effectively to compete to see who can do the best in this extraordinarily vexed and difficult area, we will not make the savings or the progress that we need and deserve. The Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, makes two things possible. It makes the figures for emissions reduction more honest, thus helping to frustrate the disinformation campaign of the climate denial industry. It also creates a far greater sense of connectivity for communities and individuals in assessing their success and failure in meeting tangible and verifiable reductions. For those reasons and others, I commend the intentions of the Bill.