Energy Bill [HL]

I am very happy to follow the noble Lord; I broadly support his amendment, along with the other two. There is a degree of repetition, but that in itself is not a problem. As we were listening to his remarks, I was almost tempted to do an AV Bill-type speech here—but I am not going to. As I think I have said before, those of us who laboured in the Augean stables of Scottish legislation in the past have over the years learnt how to make a rather thin line go quite a distance. I am interested in something that the noble Lord, to an extent, alluded to in his remarks about the start of the Industrial Revolution. When you have been in the House of Commons for a time, boundary changes become a regular feature of your life as a politician, and quite often you move with the changes. Over the years, as a Member of Parliament, I had dealings with about five different local authorities. I do not want to go through them in great detail, but I had five coal mines in my constituency which fed coal into a power station in a different local authority, and that power station generated 2,400 megawatts of electricity. That is an awful lot of smoke going up the chimney and a fantastic contributor to pollution within Scotland. The coal mines have closed, but the power station is still generating. Across the River Forth was the petrochemicals complex of Grangemouth, which was in Falkirk local authority; and adjacent to that was Bo’ness and one or two other places where there were petrochemicals and hydrocarbon facilities. Then you had Clackmannanshire, where there was, I think, the biggest bottle-making plant in Britain—again, spewing out industrial waste of all kinds. We also had timber-processing plants near Stirling, and the like. Therefore, in an area of 40 to 50 square miles, you had an incredible amount of pollution. The local authority is trying to keep tabs on this. It does not have a clear and specific obligation to try to reduce the pollution, although it has a kind of moral obligation to do so. However, I think that authorities would be anxious about co-operating on a collective basis to reduce carbon emissions and enhance the energy efficiency of these communities, because very often the pollution moves from one area into another simply with the wind gently pushing it along. I stress that these are the areas where the greatest amounts of environmental pollution are created. People know about it but I think that they would like an indication of how—to the extent that they are required to do so—their local authorities are addressing the issue. I think that this would be a fertile area of activity for primary schools, drawing up league tables and getting people in to find out what was happening. The doctrine of ““unripe time”” is perhaps the most seductive of all reasons for government inaction or inactivity. Therefore, I shall join the chorus of those advising the Minister to ignore the folk behind him and recognise that there is consensus in this Committee in favour of carbon targets at a local level. It would greatly enhance public awareness of our international obligations if they were translated into local terms. As has been said, ultimately national obligations can only be met through local commitment and local achievement. If local authorities are saying, ““We are prepared to do our bit by working within budgets””, it is only right that they should be given, individually or in concert, the opportunity to come together and establish what they would regard as a reasonable carbon budget. We should push for national discussion about the targets that we have set ourselves as a nation. Whether we are talking about large local authorities such as Birmingham and Manchester and the associated boroughs around them or the devolved Administrations in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, each should assume responsibility in its own way. We cannot continue to just amble along and hope for the best—a position that I think the Whitehall machine would prefer us to adopt or stay with. As I said, this is not a party-political point; I am simply saying to the Minister, for whom I have a great deal of regard, that he should tell the people behind him that these folk are making more sense than the dead hand of bureaucracy would have him believe. I am not saying that I hope we will necessarily embrace all or any of the amendments that are currently before us; I simply hope that the Minister will be prepared to go away and provide a distillation of the best of all three amendments and give us something to vote for when we reach Report.