Clause 2
Climate Change Bill [Lords]
5:30 pm
Steve Webb (Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
We have heard two well-informed, thoughtful and persuasive contributions. The debate has been unusual in that we have the hon. Members for Bury, North and for Stoke-on-Trent, North arguing against the Government’s position and the Conservative party supporting it. I slightly wonder which way I am leaning. It is striking that, printed on the amendment paper today, we have the names of more than 80 Labour Members who have endorsed the 80 per cent. cut.
As you will be well aware, Mr. Cook, the parliamentary arithmetic is such that, with 80 Labour Members, every single Liberal Democrat MP and all the nationalists, who I believe support the 80 per cent. target—I do not know what the Democratic Unionists think—that coalition alone, plus the Conservative Party, would guarantee 80 per cent., so the only thing that stands between this country having a scientifically up-to-date 80 per cent. target is the Conservative Party. That is a statement of fact. [Interruption.] I say that because the Government’s reluctance to endorse the 80 per cent. target would not matter if the Conservatives were to back it, because there are enough on their own side to carry it anyway. It is therefore the position of the Conservatives that is pivotal, so, in a moment, I want to focus on the logic, to the extent that there is any, of the arguments used by the Conservatives.
The starting point must be science and the 60 per cent. figure was not a political number but a scientific one. It is just an old scientific number and the people who came up with the old number now think that using the same sequence of logic that gave us a figure of 60 per cent. would now give us a figure of 80 per cent.
As the hon. Member for Angus points out, the Bill still gives the Government the power to vary the figure up or down, so the figure is not definitive but indicative. That is the point. There is a perfectly legitimate argument for saying, “Let’s not have a number in the Bill at all.” The Government could have introduced a Bill to create a committee that was given a remit and told to come back with a number that would then be considered, but that was not the avenue that the Government went down.
I refer again to the infamous long title of the Bill. The first handful of words are:
“A Bill to Set a target”.
Tempting though it is to argue that another strategy could have been adopted, given that the wording of the Bill starts with:
“A Bill to Set a target”,
we cannot fail to have a target.
The next question is, do we have what seems to us the right target, or a number that we all think is the wrong target? I find it incredible that the one person who has spoken for retaining the wrong number himself accepts that it is the wrong number. I fully accept that we do not know definitively that 80 per cent. is the right number, but the latest scientific evidence is that, indicatively, 80 per cent. is closer to the right number than 60 per cent.