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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

I have plenty of ammunition, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am exploring some of the possibilities that I thought were germane to the new clause. I will be guided, as ever, by you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Do not worry, I will not run out of material. I have not yet moved on to fuel poverty, which will be the main thrust of my remarks. I am now going through the preliminaries. It is a bit of a warm up. It is important that we explore in some detail a new clause of such dimension. As my hon. Friend has said, it was brought forward so late in the day. It was a pleasant surprise to see it set out in the amendment paper, but it caught us all as a bit of a surprise. Perhaps you will forgive us, Madam Deputy Speaker, for not being quite as well prepared as usual, and perhaps not being able to examine these matters in the detail that we might otherwise prefer. This is just a cockshy at it. It is an amateurish attempt at a late date to tease out some of the salient features. If I miss the target occasionally, Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sure that you will be as forgiving as ever. I move on to the partial answer to the question that I have raised. The new clause states:"““‘local authority measure’—" the clause is trying to be helpful—"““means any way in which a local authority can exercise any of their functions, including . . . taking any particular step in the exercise of a function, or . . . not exercising a particular power””." Perhaps this begins to answer the question raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr. Hollobone). Perhaps there is a hint that local authorities should be looking the other way in planning terms when something of this sort is in the offing. Perhaps they should not be fulfilling the normal duties that we would expect of them if they are not to exercise a particular power. That is rather worrying to me because a potential conflict could arise between the desire for microgeneration and the objective of our planning regime to protect amenity, whether it be visual, noise or whatever. That will be the subject for a later debate under a later amendment. However, the issue is germane in considering the new clause. There is another unresolved question. What are we expecting local authorities to do in not exercising a particular power? Does that have any sinister connotations in an easement of the normal rigours of our planning regime and what we expect of it?