Clause 13
Climate Change Bill [Lords]
11:30 am
John Gummer (Suffolk Coastal, Conservative)
I am unhappy about that particular part of the explanation. For example, the Ministry of Justice is just about to take over a newly refurbished building that used to be the Home Office. Despite considerable efforts, the Ministry of Justice still refused to accept that putting in hydrofluorocarbon-driven air conditioning was wholly contrary to any concept of sustainable development. It said that, taken as a whole, what it was doing was better than what was there before. Of course, it was Mr. John Gieve who did that, as is the case on many such occasions. The fact of the matter is that the one get-out that every civil servant and every Minister has is to say, “Taken as a whole, our policies are right, but we have an excuse for this one.” The new Home Office had the same excuse. It said that it had signed up to the waste electrical and electronic equipment directive, which would not allow non-HFC air conditioning. I use that example because, after all, HFCs are 2,000 times as damaging to the climate as CO2. Unless we take everything into account and do not allow Departments to get away with “taken as a whole”, we will not win the battle.