My Lords, I shall comment on baseline monitoring. We need to learn from other monitoring schemes that are already in place as a result of regulatory regimes and the planning system.
There are two issues here. First, the 12-month period may not be required for methane monitoring but it certainly is for biodiversity monitoring, which is also mentioned in one amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. Too often, I have seen planning appeals and inquiries get hideously beached as a result of inadequate 12-month monitoring of biodiversity impact. If a species is present only at certain times of the year, it is quite difficult to do a baseline account of it if you are doing that in a season when the species is not present and is not expected to be present. That causes delays in planning processes. It is important to make it very clear that some of these impacts and baselines can be dealt with only on a 12-month basis.
I accept the commendation by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, of the work done by the BGS and other statutory agency baseline surveys and ongoing monitoring processes. However, the other point of principle we ought to regard as important is the need to make commercial organisations that want to undertake commercial activities responsible for ensuring that the baseline monitoring that needs to happen before they begin is undertaken—and undertaken at their expense. That is an important principle commonly adopted in many regulatory regimes and in much of the planning system. We must not move away from that. It is important that the commercial organisations get their heads around what the issues of their impact are before they start to put forward their propositions, rather than relying on somebody else’s baselines and not really understanding, when their propositions come forward, what they will need to monitor and how they will need to monitor it. That is an absolutely fundamental principle.