Schedule 5
Climate Change Bill [Lords]
10:30 am
David Maclean (Penrith and The Border, Conservative)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle, who leads from the Front Bench, for moving the amendment that I tabled last Thursday. I apologise for not being able to be here, but I was on the Floor of the House dealing with an equally important question as saving the planet: MPs’ pay and allowances.
Where am I coming from with the amendments? I would not seek to press them to a vote or to delete the relevant measures, unless the Government volunteered to do so. However, over the past few weeks we have had important discussions about saving the planet. We have had discussions on global warming, carbon emissions, the loss of biodiversity and the destruction of the rain forest. We have been seeking to do incredibly noble things with reporting targets for 2050. I am not sure that any Committee, dealing with any legislation, has attempted to be so far-sighted or far-reaching. Now, near the end of the Bill, we have five clauses that are, literally, on garbage—on allowing councils to come up with what, in some cases, are hare-brained garbage-collection schemes or innovative recycling schemes. This could discredit the main purposes of the Bill.
We have already seen in the newspapers over the past few months stories about some of the imaginative ideas that councils have had. We have seen how some of the public have become cynical and disillusioned, because they believe that the rubbish that they put out is being recorded by spies or by cameras and microchips in their dustbins. I believe that there is scope for recycling initiatives. I believe that the Government should be running pilot schemes under fairly tight control. However, I do not believe that such measures should be in the Bill because that takes away from the glorious merits of the legislation before us.