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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

I shall speak to amendments Nos. 30 and 31, which I tabled, and express my disappointment that the Minister feels it necessary to take the power to review a target and, if he considers it appropriate, to revise it. That is about the Government moving the goalposts—to use a different analogy—and the danger is that once the microgeneration industry begins to grow, the Government will change the targets by revising them downwards, or eliminate them altogether. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) says that such targets are needed nationally to give confidence to the industry. Surely the industry would have more confidence if it knew that a cynical Government, who have already changed any number of targets and definitions in their time in office, could not come along and say, ““Well, we had this target but we don’t think it’s right now, so we’re going to revise it.”” Of course, as I pointed out in an intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth), the Government could revise the target under clause 3(8), without the need to give any reason why they wanted to review it or to engage in any consultation on their proposals to do so. That would be a matter for the Secretary of State. I am pretty sceptical about all this, as I think is apparent, but if clause 3 means anything, it is designed to try to promote mirogeneration. However, it is hedged around with caveats and exceptions and gives too much power to the Minister. It will enable him not to announce a target until 1 November 2008, and then perhaps to decide that he does not want to do so after all. If he chooses to announce a target, he can revise it without giving any information on why he wishes to do so. If, as the Minister says, what he has in mind is that the revision should always be upwards, why did he not say so? Significantly, he omitted to say that. If the Government were saying, ““We’d like to revise targets to make them more demanding, but we’ll never revise them just because it’s apparent that we can’t meet our objectives,”” I would have a little more confidence. However, the Minister does not want to do that, because the Government have set targets just as the old Soviet empire used to set lots of targets—targets that are abandoned as soon as the date at which the measurement should take place approaches. I am sure that many people throughout the country realise that targets are just a device used by the Government, and have no point unless sanctions can be imposed for failing to reach them, and no discretion is left to the Government to revise them to suit their own objectives. I will not dwell on what we have referred to briefly, but this week’s news that the child poverty reduction target has not been met is a supreme example of how worthless targets are. The Government are not prepared to accept that there are now 300,000 more children living in poverty, and they are not explaining why the target has not been met, or apologising. That just shows the worthlessness of such targets. If we are going to have targets, they should be robust ones. The Minister, or the Secretary of State, should be forced to stick to them. That would be no big deal, because if they miss them there is no sanction—only the sanction of being held up to ridicule in the court of public opinion. I suppose one could say that has happened with the failure to achieve a reduction in child poverty, which we have heard about this week. If the Secretary of State is going to revise a target, why should he not give reasons for revising it? I cannot understand why my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle does not think that that is a reasonable safeguard or requirement. I must leave him to make his own points about that. However, I agree with him in his suspicion about the whole regional agenda.