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)
Or think it either, hopefully.
Seriously, there is no right answer to British emissions, as the Bill stands. The Bill includes a general purpose clause and a figure, but it does not state how the British figure comes from what global science is telling us, which is the purpose of amendment No. 32. Science will evolve, and it gives us a figure for the required global cut in emissions. The British figure has to be higher than that for the reasons that I have stated, and as the science develops, we want the Government to be transparent about how the two are linked not least because the British number may need to change as the science develops. The next element is setting out how that linkage has been made in a report.
The whole Bill could fail if it does not include a purpose clause stating what the number in the Bill is designed to achieve. We will obviously have a substantive discussion about the right number when we discuss clause 2, so I will not stray into that save to say that without a purpose clause, the number could fail to achieve the objective that we all want for the Bill. We are trying to avoid dangerous climate change, but we know that the number in clause 2 is at best likely to fail to achieve the purpose of the Bill. That is why we think we need to be upfront about where the number comes from and to recognise our international duties.
Drawing those threads together, amendments Nos. 43 and 44 focus on the profile of the emissions, which is entirely right and proper, and I hope the Minister will have something to say about that. Amendment No. 32 tries to introduce the concept of contraction and convergence and deal with the Government’s perfectly reasonable points that the UK is not the world and that putting something in UK legislation about world targets creates problems. If we were to amend clause 1 to say how the UK contribution is calculated and linked to the world problem, however, we would move towards the same objective that the Minister’s rather more direct approach—removing the clause altogether—is designed to achieve. I hope that, rather than removing the clause, we can leave it in and amend it.