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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

I hope to take the opportunity to address those concerns by amending the Pensions Bill. I hope that we succeed in doing so. Let me focus, as promised, on the shape of what I believe would be a genuinely green Budget. The Chancellor went through a number of points about the success of different measures in the Government’s programme for achieving carbon savings, but the core national picture, however, is far less rosy and comfortable than any of us have a right to claim. The 1980 assessment of UK carbon emissions was 161.5 megatonnes. By 2005, the figure had gone down to 151.5 megatonnes—a 6.4 per cent. reduction on the 1990 figure and well below the 20 per cent. domestic targets for carbon reduction that we set for ourselves by 2010. In fact, for the last three years, the level of carbon emissions has been relatively static across the UK. The progress made on carbon reductions in the early 1990s was an accidental result of a disengagement with manufacturing and the dash for gas. We see now that there were carbon gains from that, but it would be quite wrong to try to rewrite history as though that were the intention.