Energy Bill [HL]

It is most important that we should consider these three amendments as one because they are seeking to do the same thing. I do not have any pride of ownership for my own amendment, I just want to raise some of the issues which the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, has brought forward. It is right to say that this is a cross-party concern. There is no division between us on this and it is supported by all sorts of places, some of them not wildly likely. I would like to take up the comment of the noble Baroness about the word ““resist””. There is another part which happens before that, as all of us who have been Ministers know, and that is when civil servants say, ““Better not, Minister””, a phrase I remember very well. This seems to be one of those areas. My only disagreement with the noble Baroness is this: perfectly rightly, the Government saw the particular way of reporting that we have had before with local authorities having a number of drawbacks and fitting into a pattern which the incoming Government were unhappy about. But because one gets rid of something one is unhappy about does not mean that it is better not to put something in its place, where that seems sensible. Here it is sensible. The first reason for this is because of the Localism Bill. If you get rid, absolutely rightly, of regional government and the rest of it, you are going to ask local authorities to co-operate with each other. They need a framework within which they can co-operate. This is one area where they will have to co-operate. In the borough of Ipswich, for example, much of the urban area of Ipswich is in the Suffolk Coastal district council area. To do the thing properly, local authorities will have to co-operate over the boundaries. Therefore I support this kind of structure which will enable people to start off with the same basis, so they know how they are going to do it. I shall have the pleasure of chairing the Suffolk-wide green conference which we have every year to promote exactly these things. In an entirely Conservative-controlled local authority, county and district, everyone believes that this is a necessary part of doing what they want to do. Suffolk wants to become the greenest county because it wants to force other people to compete with it, and that seems a good thing. The Minister may have been advised that it is not necessary because this is all voluntary and we will all be doing it happily together. We are not asking for compulsion, we are asking for a framework within which people can use their several and different talents to do this job properly. All the amendments, certainly mine, show the need to take seriously the fact that we will not meet national carbon budgets unless we meet local carbon budgets. I have spent most of the past 10, 12 or 13 years trying to help big businesses change so that they become much more corporately responsible and concerned about these issues. I have become more and more passionate about the practicalities of doing this rather than the high-flown rhetoric. The more one does it, the more one wants to say, ““Can I tell you how you can cut your energy by 13 per cent simply by using some kind of regulator of the voltage? Can I help you to do these things in a simple, basic way?””. When I looked at the Bill it seemed that the one failing I wanted to correct is that we need to engage local authorities so that they feel that they have a real part in the achievement of the Green Deal. That is why this is so important. It is to get the local authorities to think that the Government have said that if they are going to achieve these things, if they are going to do these things, local authorities are an essential part of it. A lot of the practical nuts and bolts, which is what the Federation of Small Businesses is saying, have got to be put together at the local level by the local authority working with its own community. That is why my amendment refers to working, "““in partnership with local residents, businesses and””—" I hate the word ““stakeholders”” but it seems to be compulsory— "““stakeholders including schools and hospitals in drawing up and carrying out the strategy””." The joint strategy referred to specifically in subsection (2) of the proposed new clause draws attention to that co-operative element which the Localism Bill will have and points out that CO2 is not a respecter of county or district boundaries. It is very important to make this part of the way in which we proceed. Lastly, I have suggested that we should ask the Secretary of State to introduce the local carbon budget scheme to begin at the start of the second national carbon budget period. I would like to pick up something that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said. We do not have a long period of time to decide when it might be convenient for this or that to happen. The timetable before us is dictated by the climate change which we have caused. I will not get back to housing, but if we had known about this at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we would have done things rather better. But we did not. Now we are having to pay the price for what was vastly beneficial for the United Kingdom. We have a bigger responsibility than any other country because we got a bigger profit out of it earlier on. What is happening now is something that we caused—not quite alone, but certainly we were the leaders in what has caused the climate change that we have, because it takes that much time to work through. Therefore we have a huge moral responsibility to put this right. There is an urgency here. In everything we do we should be asking the Government to sign up to that emergency by putting dates on it. We have had too many pieces of legislation. I remember a White Paper on energy in which the only date was 2050; every other date had been taken out. I think that even the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, will accept that, if you take out every date which the Government are unlikely to live to see, it does not make for a sense of urgency. I am very keen on having things that everybody in this Room will see. Therefore I ask the Minister to take this extremely seriously.