I will be as brief as possible, as there are other Bills that we want to debate today, and this Bill has already been fully discussed on Second Reading and passed through Committee with no amendments. The Bill has the full support of the Opposition. It builds on the work of the previous Government, who published a consultation and draft Bill in December 2009.
I listened with interest to the remarks of the hon. Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) on his new clause 1 calling for a cost-benefit analysis of the measures in this Bill. His response to an intervention asking which costs and which benefits he proposed to measure was unclear and vague, however. As the hon. Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) has said, the Bill implements the annex to the Antarctic environmental protection treaty. It is important that we are committed to doing that and putting it in place as soon as possible. There is a danger of sending out completely the wrong signals if we are already questioning, at this stage, whether this Bill is really of benefit.
I am in some ways reluctant to encourage the hon. Member for Bury North to speak at any more length during today’s proceedings, but does he think that the analysis would be conducted with the possibility of repealing the Act? As I said, the UK has made a
commitment to the treaty and it is important not only that we are among the first to ratify the annex and to incorporate it into domestic law, but that we send out the signal that the UK is absolutely committed as a responsible guardian of the environment. We should not be seen as weak on this issue.