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Planning and Energy Bill

It is customary to congratulate the Member who wins the ballot. I have always wondered why we do that—I would rather have won the ballot myself—but I do congratulate the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) on choosing this topic. I was happy to lend my name to this brief, modest and reasonable Bill. The Bill calls for a bit of reverse engineering in our approach to tackling the challenge of climate change, rather than leaving everything to top-down targets without thinking about the mechanisms that are needed on the ground floor. The very first word—““enable””—is probably the most important. The Bill is intended not to tell, not to spend, not to force, but to enable. It contains another word that I hesitate to mention, the word ““reasonable””. I know that we can spend hours, weeks and years in this place debating what it means to be reasonable, and I hope we will not get into the semantics now, but I think that the intention in this instance is more than clear. We sometimes underestimate the hugeness of the challenge of climate change to our politics, our public institutions, to private business and to our personal behaviour. It covers the waterfront. Ipsos MORI recently published a review of the year which I think was sent to Members, although I was not able to lay hands on it yesterday. One of the centre-spreads featured attitudes to climate change. The general conclusion was that people in Britain now accept that there is a problem and accept that human behaviour is making a difference, which was not the case five or 10 years ago. When it comes to dealing with the problem, however, a gulf emerges. The survey exposed the fact that apart from doing a little bit of, dare I say, recycling—perhaps changing light bulbs—most of us are ““armchair environmentalists””. We demand that the Government do something rather than doing anything ourselves, while issuing the caveat that whatever the Government propose we will oppose, and thus we make no progress whatever. The purpose of the Bill is not to focus on the great big problem and leave it nebulous, or to ask the Government to do everything, but to concentrate on what local government can do and enable it to build in the capacity to meet its targets. I approved of what the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth) said in his intervention. We ought to acknowledge that local authorities are getting ahead of the Government on this issue, and engage in a stronger dialogue with them about what they can achieve at ground-floor and local-community level. The aim of the Merton rule, which has been widely known and accepted for more than four years and has been copied by over 100 local authorities, is to persuade developers to obtain at least 10 per cent. of any new building energy from renewable sources. I know about the BedZED project, but there are quite a few other projects scattered across Britain. There are combined-heat-and-power and energy-efficiency projects, and experimental schemes initiated by architects going all the way back to Susan Rolfe's experimental house with solar panels in Oxford. Such development is patchy, however. The Bill is intended to achieve some co-ordination so that best practice can be shared, and authorities can learn about what is going on elsewhere and proceed in a positive fashion.