Earl Cathcart: My Lords, given that 20 per cent of the population live in rural areas, why do they receive only 10 per cent of the funding from the Housing Corporation's affordable housing programme?
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, the vast majority of local councils say that the annual ratcheting up of landfill tax has made and will make fly-tipping worse. Together with the cost of the waste carrier's licence, there are now proposals for a bin tax for households. Does the Minister agree that, with only 1 per cent of fly-tippers prosecuted, more will choose to avoid the escalating cost of legitimate disposal...
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, one of the arguments used by the retiring Prime Minister is that ID cards would help the police to solve the 900,000-plus unsolved crimes. If this is the case, and if the police are even half successful, what does the Prime Minister-in-waiting intend to do with these hundreds of thousands of newly convicted criminals? Send them, no doubt, to our already overcrowded prisons.
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, I rather dread the prospect of yet another army of inspectors. Last year, my farm had to pass five different inspections, which I thought was rather excessive. I suggested that only one inspector should come and look at compliance across all my farming activities. "No, no", laughed the inspector, "that would mean that us inspectors would have to go on endless courses to learn all...
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, the issue is not just the plethora of new rules but also the fragmentation and duplication of Defra's administration. I farm in Norfolk. On my way here today, I counted at least10 Defra offices with which we in Norfolk have to deal. Heaven help you if there is a marginal difference between your calculation of a field size and Defra's. It will hold up your entire payment for months...
Earl Cathcart: My Lords—
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, I welcome the Climate Change Bill which includes powers for councils to introduce financial incentives for recycling. The Government should look again at their recycling policies. Only last week they published figures showing that householders are recycling more than ever—30 per cent. This is good news and householders should be congratulated. But no, the Government now plan to...
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, will the Government take advantage of the assembled international community at the Bali conference to discuss the international market in carbon credits, which could be used to support countries such as Bangladesh? If so, does the Minister think it important to have in those negotiations a precise percentage for the amount of overseas carbon credits that the Government will allow to...
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, I am delighted to be speaking at the end of such an interesting debate. Climate change is high on the political agenda on all sides of this House. We all support the introduction of this Bill and the recognition or consensus, as the Minister said, that Britain and the world in general must reduce carbon emissions, and quickly. We on these Benches warmly support the Bill. However,...
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, I declare an interest as a farmer in Norfolk. When winding up the debate on Second Reading of the Climate Change Bill last week, the Minister said: "I am not a business manager".—[ Official Report, 27/11/2007; col. 1212.] At the time I thought, "More's the pity", because that is exactly what Defra needs. Defra's incompetence was highlighted by the new single farm payment scheme in...
Earl Cathcart: We had some sympathy with this amendment, but it is a bit of a curate's egg; it is good only in parts. I had thought that my noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith was trying to include all the greenhouse gases in the target figure in line 1. I thought that was good. If the goal is to stop global warming, all contributions to the problem should be taken into account. The very first page of the Climate...
Earl Cathcart: Amendments Nos. 10 and 11 seek to achieve a very similar objective. Amendment No. 11 would set a duty on the committee within six months of its constitution to propose a new 2050 target for approval by Parliament. If it is so approved, the Secretary of State must make an order under Clause 2 to amend the 2050 target. We believe that setting the target is a scientific problem, or more aptly it...
Earl Cathcart: Not surprisingly, I fully support the amendment. Kyoto, Bali, Stern, Al Gore, the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth and all political parties acknowledge that climate change is the most important issue facing us. If that is the case and we are serious about reducing our emissions, all future legislation should be compatible with this Climate Change Bill. Currently, on the front of all...
Earl Cathcart: Before we started to debate these amendments, I was going to say that the amendments from the Liberal Democrat Benches are confusing, as they seem to contradict Amendment No. 8 to Clause 1, earlier tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, which was supported by the Liberal Democrat Front Bench. That amendment seemed to rule out carbon trading altogether, by confining our 2050 target to UK...
Earl Cathcart: I thank the noble Lord for that intervention. I had thought that the idea was to confine the 2050 target to UK domestic use, although he may have said that there would be carbon trading on top of that. Be that as it may. We believe that to put percentages in would be far too restrictive. However, if we were asked to pluck a figure from the air, what about 25 per cent? We have had 30 per cent,...
Earl Cathcart: Well, my noble friend is certainly more of an expert than I am. The committee's members are the experts, and they should decide. The Bill should have no restrictions in it, but should give the committee a steer on our thinking. Once the committee has looked at all the evidence, it should then say what percentage limits should apply. The concept of allowing overseas credits to be used to...
Earl Cathcart: It may well, but the climate change committee could decide on the mechanism for tapering in carbon trading. Buying indulgences abroad may increase as years go by but, by having a tapering mechanism in place, the whole thing would reduce. I said earlier that we should not put a percentage into this Bill, as we would only be guessing. The setting of limits for carbon credits should be left to...
Earl Cathcart: In one respect, these two amendments say the same thing: that the upper limit should be removed. We support that. In the unlikely event that the UK's emissions reductions are 50 per cent by 2020, it would be admirable and we would be patting ourselves on the back, but as things stand, with the upper limit at 32 per cent, a higher achievement would be against the law, which would be absurd. We...
Earl Cathcart: The Committee on Climate Change ought to be setting this target in the same way that we are recommending that it should set the 2050 target.
Earl Cathcart: moved Amendment No. 36: Clause 5, page 3, line 23, at end insert— "( ) for the budgetary periods including the years 2015, 2020, 2030 and 2040, must be such that the annual equivalent of the carbon budget for the period is lower than the 1990 baseline by at least any percentage that may be recommended by the Committee on Climate Change and approved by a resolution of both Houses of Parliament;"