Schedule 6
Climate Change Bill [Lords]
4:49 pm
Martin Horwood (Shadow Minister (Environment), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Cheltenham, Liberal Democrat)
I was just extolling the virtues of cross-party co-operation and of the green movement generally. I shall move on to the specifics of the amendment.
As the Minister said, there is some common ground, and he was good enough to welcome the essence of the policy in our amendment. He was right to say that the status of the RTFO itself is not at issue. Interestingly, he said that what we seek to do is to give instructions to the administrator to ensure the sustainability of the fuels involved. The amendment proposes to use the word “ensure” instead of the current word “promote”, making the instruction in law to the administrator much stronger and more powerful.
In that sense, I am completely with the Minister. He suggests that amendment No. 1 introduces that requirement without sufficiently clearly defining it. He said that that might introduce uncertainty over the validity of certificates and that the criteria should be EU-wide. That is true and we agree with that, and we agree with sufficiently robust criteria being adopted at European level, as we have said. There is no shortage of definitions of sustainability around biofuels.
The Swiss Government already have a working scheme in which they have clearly defined measures of sustainability. The Environmental Audit Committee studied that scheme when we examined the issue. The Gallagher report also goes some way towards defining it. Professor Gallagher made the statement that it should be possible
“to establish a genuinely sustainable industry provided that robust, comprehensive and mandatory sustainability standards are developed and implemented.”
Professor Gallagher thinks that that is eminently possible, and goes on to make specific recommendations including
“the replacement of volume or energy based targets with comparable greenhouse gas saving targets as soon as practicable”.
There is a degree of consensus already available.
We then came on to the rather more technical and legal point. It is right to raise the point that the noble Lord Rooker raised in another place: that, in effect, there would have to be a 12-month standstill period for this regulation, and that it might in the end contradict EU trade rules. If all those scenarios came to pass and the renewable energy directive was adopted on time, the amendment might be ineffective because it would have to wait for the EU rules to be adopted and then it would be superseded.
That is the argument that my noble Friend Lord Teverson thought was so impressive in the other place. We have reflected together on the matter and realised that it is dependent on the renewable energy directive being adopted. That was the technical point that I put back to him, to which he said that I “might be right”—I think that I am quoting him correctly. I think that I am right. He said that policy cannot be set unilaterally because of the overlap of subject matter, but that is not true because the renewable transport fuel obligation itself is a unilateral piece of policy that is already adopted ahead of the renewable energy directive coming into force. I fear that I am not persuaded to withdraw my amendment.