Clause 18
Climate Change Bill [Lords]
6:00 pm
Martin Horwood (Shadow Minister (Environment), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Cheltenham, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment No. 35, in clause 18, page 10, line 6, at end insert
‘and any sanctions proposed against those responsible for budget excesses’.
What happens if we fail? Taken collectively, globally, the consequences are unthinkable. The cost of failure is famine, poverty, disease and death on an unprecedented scale. However, what happens specifically if we, the British political class, fail to meet the objectives being discussed in the Bill? I am saying “we” because I am not assuming that the Labour Government will still be around in 2012-13. It could be any of us, any combination of us or any of our successors who are in government at the time.
At the moment, the great sanction present in the Bill is a report on proposals and policies. In a sense, that is appropriate. If the budget target is missed, action must be taken. It is a greater threat—but only just—than the letter that has to be written by the Governor of the Bank of England on behalf of the Monetary Policy Committee to the Chancellor for exceeding the inflation target. I suspect that, as more and more inflation targets are missed and more and more letters are written, familiarity might even breed contempt for that sanction as well. I can see the Treasury quaking in its boots at the receipt of another letter. Likewise, I do not see Parliament shaken to its foundations by the need to produce a report. Yet in most cases when Governments break the law, which in a sense is what we are talking about when the targets are missed, some consequences normally follow.
There have been various suggestions as to what those sanctions might be. In another place, Lord Teverson suggested that the Secretary of State might one day be dragged away to the Tower of London because the targets had not been met. I do not think that he spoke in all seriousness but, given the consequences of failure, we must think seriously about what should happen to Secretaries of State who preside over the missing of such targets. We as the British Parliament could think collectively about a financial penalty—the Treasury could buy the carbon credits, perhaps at a premium, to make up for the lost target. However, that rather undermines the arguments about trying to minimise the proportion of targets met by purchasing credits, rather than by a genuine domestic effort to decarbonise the economy. If, at some stage, the Treasury could be persuaded to say that that was an affordable route, the sanction would clearly have been counter-productive, as it would have encouraged the Government to think about buying their way out of the problem.
We tried to table an amendment that would have caused an automatic reduction in Cabinet salaries equivalent to the excess by which the target had been missed. I thought that it was an exciting amendment; it would have led to an interesting debate that could have extended into the general area of performance-related pay for Ministers and Governments. Sadly, it was ruled out of order on the grounds that there are, apparently, already existing processes for setting Cabinet salaries, and this was not one of them.