My Lords, I shall not detain the House very long. I am not sure that the amendment as written is precisely right, but the important principle that comes out of it—I come back to what I said briefly at Second Reading—is that, at the end of the day, the UK economy has to crowd out coal by other generating fuels. Before the election, the Prime Minister, the then Deputy Prime Minister and the then leader of the Opposition together bravely pledged that coal should come out of UK generating capacity. For whatever reason, after the election only one of those people is left in office—the Prime Minister—so on his shoulders rests that responsibility as our Prime Minister to achieve that pledge.
I do not see a great deal of movement from the Government in fulfilling it. It needs to be addressed and this amendment goes some way towards that. But it is a much larger issue which we could solve so easily, probably by using an active emissions performance
standard rather than one that is fixed, as it is at the moment, in primary legislation. I hope that the Government—indeed, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Office—will bring forward proposals to deliver this. In Scotland, they talk about vows; I see this as a vow that is fundamental to our climate change obligation not just to the UK but to the rest of the world.