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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

I share my hon. Friend’s view and I worry about the propagandisation of our young people by teachers, whether through Make Poverty History or climate change and so on. I worry that teachers appear to be all too willing to express their views to young and impressionable people, get those young people to sign petitions or whatever and thus give them expectations that will inevitably be disappointed, probably leading to the effect that my hon. Friend described. I could not agree with him more. Clause 2 led to an interesting divergence of view between the promoter and the Minister for Energy. I am rather on the Minister’s side. It is not right to imply that any Prime Minister should be so involved in the detail of every Department’s work that he has to answer for it. I should declare an interest: in the dim and distant past, I was a junior Minister in the Department of Trade and Industry and I therefore have a sort of affection for and loyalty to it. Partly because of that, I believe that Departments should be prepared to stand up for what they do. Secretaries of State should be responsible for their actions and those of their Departments. They should be the ones to account—if account is necessary—to the House. Attempts to draw in the Prime Minister and, even worse, to give him a sense of omniscience and omnipotence, which he knows that he has but the rest of us now know that he does not possess, are not the right way forward. I am therefore with the Minister on the matter and I hope that the Bill emerges from Committee without that aspect. Clause 2 provides for laying before Parliament—by we know not whom yet—a report on"““steps that the government has taken to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases during the period to which the report relates””." Could that be a zero report? Could it simply state, ““None””, and leave it at that? I am sure that the implication of the provision is that a report can have meaning only if it says something. Worthy officials in Departments are often tasked by Ministers with writing about something that the Department has achieved in the past year. A 10-point action plan usually emerges—that used to be the favourite in my day, although I do not know whether inflation has had an effect over the years. The first one or two points were barely credible and the following eight were almost laughable, but the 10-point action plan was supposed to get the Minister and the Department off the hook. My fear about clause 2 is that it would give rise to that phenomenon all too readily. That would be regrettable.