Clause 14
Climate Change Bill [Lords]
4:00 pm
Gregory Barker (Shadow Minister, Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Bexhill and Battle, Conservative)
Clause 14 places a duty on the Prime Minister to put together a report setting out proposals and policies for meeting the carbon budget. However, the existing proposal is not robust enough. The Prime Minister should be able to tell Parliament not only what we should be doing to meet the budgets, but, crucially, how we should do it. That is an important difference. Rather than merely producing a report, it would show far greater leadership if the Prime Minister were to set out a detailed climate change strategy on how the Government are going to meet those demanding targets.
The Prime Minister should not merely report on the progress made in the past and display a map of where we need to go. They should lead on how we will meet our targets in future. The reporting procedures in the Bill will not be complete unless they include a duty for the annual reports to contain an assessment of the effectiveness of the measures taken to reduce carbon emissions. The amendments would require that the statement laid before Parliament should include a comprehensive report on the effectiveness of the climate change strategy as well as details of any further policies or proposals that may need to be included. Government policies to reduce emissions should be assessed regularly, their successes should be reported on openly and changes should be proposed wherever progress is falling short.
I am quite up front in saying that we in the Conservative party fully intend to be the Government responsible for the report on the first budgetary period, so we should be holding ourselves to the highest standards of accountability in meeting those targets. I consider the strategy report to be like the annual finance Budget. The Chancellor proposes a tax and spending regime for a year and says that he will bring in x billion pounds in taxation and spend y billion pounds on providing services. However, it is inevitable that in the following year the Chancellor will find that growth was not exactly as predicted or that events caused a little bit more spending than proposed, so in the next Budget he will therefore make the necessary adjustments to get things back on track. If we are to bring carbon emissions under control, that is how we should deal with them.
There is precedent for placing a duty on the Government to produce such a strategy report. For example, section 2(1) of the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000 places a duty on Ministers to
“prepare and publish...a strategy setting out the authority’s policies for ensuring...that as far as reasonably practicable persons do not live in fuel poverty.”
Section 2(5) requires Ministers to
“take such steps as are in its opinion necessary to implement the strategy.”
There is also precedent for requesting a detailed report or proposal. Schedule 5 to the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 and schedule 89 to the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 both require the submission of detailed proposals. The requirement for a detailed report already exists in regulation 32 of the Ionising Radiation Regulations 1999.
With specific reference to amendment No. 47, as we have already discussed, it would make eminently good sense to set out indicative annual ranges in this detailed strategy report. The strategy report should be the natural and authoritative place for the Government to publish their indicative annual ranges.