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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

I am sure that my hon. Friend is right in that. That is one of the trade-offs or balances that we inevitably have to strike in these matters. There is the impact that the figures might have. I concede to my hon. Friend that there is a risk that if we went down the regional approach that I am suggesting there might not be the impact that the national figure might have. That is a presentational impact, with, perhaps, policy repercussions on Government. Against that, I am prepared to trade off what I believe would be the benefits of a more focused and a more regional approach. Subsection (5) states that if"““a target is designated under subsection (1)””—" at the moment, we are talking about a national target, but this would apply equally to my regional targets—"““the Secretary of State must take reasonable steps to secure the target is met.””" I do not know what that means. I hope that the Minister will sum up this part of the debate. He might tell us what he envisages would be the departmental or governmental response to a failure to meet a target, be it national or regional, not least bearing in mind that new clause 4 appears to have placed much of the responsibility for the delivery of this policy on local authorities rather than on national Government. It says, interestingly—here is the escape hatch—that if"““the Secretary of State does not designate a target under subsection (1) he shall publish forthwith a statement of his reasons.””" If we take the regional approach that I am suggesting, and if we were to undertake what amounts to a pilot scheme in one of the regions, the Secretary of State might want to return, having conducted that pilot project, to say, ““I do not think that the target approach will work in this case,”” for whatever reason. He might say that the Government were not able sensibly to formulate a target or that they fell so far short of it that the outcome demonstrated that the targeting approach, in this context, did not make very much sense, or whatever. The let-out, if we want to put it that way, is interesting. Funnily enough, I rather welcome it. I do not see any point in a Bill such as the one that is before us trying to shackle any Secretary of State so much, and certainly not to oblige him to provide targets, either national or regional, to such an extent that if, for some reason, they were not met, we would then have to continue to produce endless revised targets—something that the Government have often done in the past—that is, to set a target, fail to meet it and so change the target downwards so that it is then more easily achieved. That does not get us anywhere. In a funny way, the let-out, if I may call it that, in subsection (6), probably makes a degree of sense.