Clause 36
Energy Bill
5:00 pm
Martin Horwood (Shadow Minister (Environment), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Cheltenham, Liberal Democrat)
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention but I do not think she is ambitious enough. A wide range of policy tools that have already been developed from the EU’s wildlife and habitat’s directive and from environmental impact assessments are designed to tackle precisely such difficult problems. This is an enabling provision that would allow the Secretary of State to design a banding system that could take into account environmental impacts of that kind—the technology and the systems behind assessing environmental impacts are already well established so I do not think that would be too much of a challenge.