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Climate Change Bill [Lords]

It took me quite a long time to decide to add my name to new clause 11. My reservations about it were exactly the opposite of those expressed by the Minister. I do not think for one moment that it would prevent the development of any sort of new power station working to any sort of standards. My reservations centre on the fact that the new clause is based around the word ““may””, not ““shall””. We can argue about what different parties may do if they are in government, but as there is no ““shall”” there is no obligation to act. I looked at the Bill, and I found that a couple of voices were permanently ringing in my ears. One was the voice of my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), who has legitimately challenged this House to say at what point the 80 per cent. target becomes reality politics as opposed to fantasy politics. It is not enough to set a 2050 target if we have no idea of how we are going to achieve it. The second voice that permanently nags me is that of Aneurin Bevan, who, a long time ago, said that there is no point in willing the ends if we are not prepared to will the means. In our context, the means have to be measurable intervention measures that set minimum performance standards, and perhaps minimum requirements, about carbon reductions. I have awkward feelings about the introduction of thresholds in the Bill. If we want to amend those thresholds, we will need to come back with primary legislation. If there is a case for thresholds, they should be minimum thresholds that would allow us to set standards that have to be met, but perhaps exceeded. There is nothing in the new clause that does that, and there is not even a duty to require those regulations to be brought in. Those were my misgivings, but running through the Bill is a recognition that, as various hon. Members have said, we have to be willing to define the route map to take us from where we are to where we want to be in 2020 and 2050. Having said that, there has been a degree of ungenerosity from the Opposition in their criticism of the Government's lack of imagination. I am pleased that we have this new Secretary of State, and I am really pleased that he was able to come to this House and announce that we were raising the 2050 target from 60 per cent. to 80 per cent. I was also pleased that he made a point about feed-in tariffs and the genuine scope for community-based energy generation. It is quite wrong to pretend that the sense of vision and leadership in his statements did not reflect a Secretary of State who could be quite transformational in delivering the 2020 and 2050 targets—I hope that does not damn him for all time. The circumstances in which the Bill has to be taken forward provide the Secretary of State with ammunition, which, three to six months ago, we may not have anticipated needing. The collapse of global financial systems has prompted leaders in our country and internationally about the need for public investment to deliver economic stability. Where will we find that? The answer, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) said, is probably to be found in a green new deal. That is the lesson to be learned from what has been done in Germany since 2001, and probably since 1990. I have done quite a lot of work on the way in which Germany has introduced its feed-in tariffs and the transformational effect that that has had. The one benchmark comparison I offer is that the Government have set 2016 as the staging point at which we will insist that all new houses are to be zero carbon, and by which we will be building eco-towns. But by 2016, Germany will have converted between 40 and 60 of its existing cities into eco-cities because it has taken a visionary approach to the scope for feed-in tariff legislation. We can anticipate that the Secretary of State will take an equally visionary approach to the same provisions when they come back before the House in another Bill.