---

Local Government and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The issue needs careful consideration. It will be important that there is a figure in the Bill because that will show that the Government mean business. I hope that the expert committee will start its work early next year. If the door is open under the framework of the Act to use a mechanism involving the expert committee so that the figure can be upped in the light of scientific consensus, that is a perfectly sensible way of going forward. The Government cannot be accused of vagueness at the start of such a serious process. The Bill will propose five-year periods for carbon budgeting, starting in autumn 2008. Binding limits will be set for each five-year period and three consecutive periods may be examined at one time. The draft Bill included a requirement that the committee on climate change should make an annual report to Parliament on the progress being made. That provision was very welcome and supported by the Select Committee. The Committee also supported five-year budget periods. Some argue for annual statutory targets, but they would be bound to create a focus on shorter-term reduction objectives. Such targets would also be too sensitive to weather, short-term climate change and changes to the market price of energy. Five-year periods are thus more sensible and fit in with the internationally agreed time periods involved under Kyoto and the European Union emissions trading scheme. When Friends of the Earth and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds gave evidence to the Select Committee, they supported annual statutory budgets because they thought that the fact that a five-year period could span a change of Government might weaken a Government's resolve to address the situation. However, that Select Committee evidence session shows that both Friends of the Earth and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would be content with five-year budgetary periods, provided that there be explicit annual milestones, so that the Government could be held accountable and could make decisions regarding emissions during a five-year budget period, not just at the end of it. The Select Committee agreed with that and supported a five-year period, but with annual milestones set and published by the climate change committee. In their response, the Government welcomed the support for the five-year budget period, but apparently they are set against annual targets or milestones, which they say would undermine the credibility of the system. They cite all kinds of problems—and the Select Committee would agree with them, if we were talking about annual statutory targets, but we are not, and I am not. We are talking about milestones that are not statutory. Milestones will exist anyway along a five-year route—a 15-year route, in fact—even if the Government do not want to recognise them. The minute that the Bill becomes an Act, people will talk. They will be anxious and interested. Parliamentarians and all sorts of organisations will want to know what progress we are making, and what the ifs and buts are. It would be better for the Government to embrace that reality, and not to seem to set their face against indicative milestones. Such milestones are not statutory targets. I believe that they are entirely consistent with an annual emissions report to Parliament—something to which the Government are committed. What will that report talk about, unless it is the progress that has, or has not, been made, and how we will deal with the situation? Of course some people will misunderstand or deliberately misrepresent the annual milestones, but that is no reason why the Government should not embrace the concept, and I hope that they will consider doing so. As I have said, I am pleased that the proposed committee on climate change will start its work sooner rather than later. The Select Committee made a number of comments about it. Mainly we wanted to make sure that it was independent and had sufficient resources, but I will pick on just one comment: the proposal that, among the experts on the committee, there be a specialist in dealing with and understanding biodiversity. Biodiversity is obviously affected by climate change, which has all sorts of human and economic consequences for it. I am disappointed and surprised that the Government disagreed with that in their response. They said that biodiversity was considered in everything that the Government did, and that it was in the ether, as it were, at all times. Well, I am sorry, but I am not terribly convinced by that. We are setting up a mechanism through which to consider climate change, and biodiversity should be among the issues that are constantly considered; it should not just be assumed that it is being considered at all times, because that is not convincing. In the draft Bill, it was proposed that international aviation and shipping emissions not be included, but that they be included at some future point. The position now, I believe, is that the Government accept the logic that they must be included at some point. That will of course affect the difficulty, or otherwise, of achieving a 60 or 70 per cent. reduction target, but at least the target will be based on reality. The Government are right to indicate that the committee on climate change will have the power to recommend the point at which emissions from international aviation and shipping be included. I must say that in the evidence that the Committee received, the opinion was overwhelmingly that they should be included from day one. There is a case for saying that although there are clearly technical difficulties, and although clearly the planet cannot deal with the issue until there is proper international agreement, there is such a thing as political leadership, which perhaps involves taking a few risks. No one is going to say, ““You shouldn't do that.”” No country will deny that we should do it, ultimately. We, as the first industrialised country, are in a strong position to give political leadership on the issue. We should look towards an early inclusion of international aviation and shipping emissions, rather than wait for the European Union emissions trading scheme or some other international agreement, which will clearly be needed beyond that. It will strengthen the Government's arguments for securing those international agreements if they take the lead in the way that I suggest.