---

AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s ingenuity in weaving his constituency so seamlessly into the debate. Of course, he is absolutely right: the carbon sequestered in peat bogs in this country alone is worth more than all that the forests of France and Germany have sequestered in wood. It is an absolutely essential resource, and the hon. Gentleman is right to make the point, even though he does so extremely shamelessly for the benefit of his own constituents. There is now a natural opportunity to extend the UK’s leadership in carbon trading to trading in other environmental services while attracting new and larger-scale investments than voluntary efforts can afford and providing significant additional resources from the private sector to help to achieve goals that are being pursued almost exclusively through the public and not-for-profit sectors. The growth of the carbon market after mandatory requirements were imposed after years of very limited voluntary effort by business demonstrates the necessity and effectiveness of genuine financial incentives in underpinning market mechanisms. In the absence of international treaties with mandatory limits on the use of other ecosystem services, our tax system could provide an alternative basis for the development of market mechanisms comparable to those of the carbon market. I want briefly to touch on the raising of the duties on alcohol, which relates to a problem that has been widely trailed in the press in recent weeks. No raising of the duty will meet the taxation objectives that I have set out. It will mean that rich people can go on drinking as much alcohol as they like and poorer people may think a little bit more about whether to buy it. That in itself is not the issue. It would be much more powerful were we to introduce the sort of controls that were introduced in the pharmaceutical sector a few years ago when, because of the deaths of people consuming bottles of paracetamol, we said that there could be no two-for-one or BOGOF—buy one, get one free—offers. That now needs to be imposed in the alcohol sector. We cannot expect big supermarket chains not to try to package alcohol at reduced prices. However, insisting that it can be sold only at a recommended retail price, as we have in the pharmaceutical sector, would be a far surer way of achieving the desired change in people’s behaviour than simply increasing duty as a revenue-raising measure.