Clause 1
Climate Change Bill [Lords]
10:45 am
Steve Webb (Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
In the absence of the hon. Member for Banbury, I was keen to move amendment No. 43 in order to discuss the important matters that it raises, and I am grateful to you, Mr. Cook, for giving me the opportunity to do that.
Amendments Nos. 43 and 44 focus not simply on the destination point—2050— but also on the route map, because, as was discussed on Second Reading, we cannot simply chug along as we are and then suddenly cut emissions in 2049, which is clearly not what we want. My understanding of what the hon. Member for Banbury was driving at is that we need to give much more attention to the profile of our emissions over the next 42 years and not obsess solely on the destination point. Clearly, the more that we save in getting to that destination, the better it will be. Additionally, the earlier that we save, the better it will be in terms of the climate change impact of any given amount of emissions. It is therefore important to discuss the amendment.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham and I tabled amendment No. 32 because we anticipated that the Government would want to take away clause 1. As ever, we wanted to be helpful. We tried to table an amendment that would give the Government what they want. I understand the points that the Minister is likely to make about how the UK cannot change global temperature by acting on its own. We can play our part, but we cannot achieve a specific outcome on our own. I understand that saying that the goal of the Bill is to achieve something for the planet when we are a small percentage of it raises issues.
The purpose of amendment No. 32 is to ask how we move from what we know about what the planet has to do to what we know about what the UK has to do. Amendment No. 32 is our probing attempt to put contraction and convergence, which are jargon, into the legislation. We want to know whether the Government accept that aggregate contraction and convergence on emissions per head should be central to our approach. If they accept that, when do they think that that should take place? The obvious point for that to happen, given the focus on 2050, would be 2050. If we had a formula and reporting obligation, as set out in subsection (4), we would know how the Government have gone from whatever science tells us about the global target to what the UK target should be.
It has been suggested that this Bill should not include a purpose clause, because we do not do that kind of thing in this country. That is essentially what people have said—to quote the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal, “It is not British”.
I am sure that the Minister is familiar with the Sustainable Communities Act 2007, section 1(1) of which states:
“The principal aim of this Act is to promote the sustainability of local communities.”
At the time, which was only last year, the House felt it appropriate to include a purpose clause, so there is good precedent. Likewise, legislation in this country over the years has given principal aims to bodies. For example, the Environment Act 1995 sets out
“the principal aim of the Agency...in discharging its functions so to protect or enhance the environment.”
There is no inherent reason why UK legislation should not have a purpose clause. The advantage of including a purpose clause in this Bill, which is how the Government introduced it in the first place, is that without it we will just have a number. As the legislation stands, that number will be plucked from the atmosphere before the Climate Change Committee acts. It is not apparent from the Bill where that number will come from. Although there are mechanisms to update the number, the processes are not as transparent as they should be.
Amendment No. 32 addresses how we set the UK contribution to reducing global emissions. If the science tells us that a certain cut in global emissions is needed to avoid the temperature rise that will lead to dangerous climate change, then the UK should not merely achieve the global average but go further. We give two reasons in the amendment why it should. “We”—the United States and some other developed countries—are a big part of the problem, and a lot of the emissions in the system are from us. It is often stated that Britain is responsible for only 2 per cent. of emissions, but in a sense we have moved a lot of our emissions offshore. For example, a UK consumer who buys a consumer durable produced in the far east creates emissions elsewhere, so it is clearly an understatement to say we are only a tiny part of the issue. Not only are we a bigger part of current emissions than that figure suggests, but we are particularly responsible for historic emissions. As we caused a disproportionate part of the problem, we therefore have a responsibility to be a disproportionate part of the solution.
The second part of amendment No. 32 addresses the question whether we can say to the rest of the world, and particularly to rapidly developing countries, that we have had the fun, but they cannot have it? It is clearly morally unacceptable to say that we have had rapid growth and a high standard of living, but they cannot have those things. I have promised not to use the word “moral” too frequently over the next two and a half weeks, but the Bill is about not only science, but—.