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Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak, having arrived rather late for the remainder of this debate, but I cannot restrain myself from speaking on mandatory reporting. I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said. I cannot believe that we are still discussing this issue at this stage in the climate change debate. Given the acknowledgement that climate change is one of the most severe threats facing the globe and that businesses, individuals and organisations in this country need to rally round and reduce carbon emissions, the fact that the Environment Agency has produced a valuable series of reports on environmental reporting by British industry, as well as the fact that a disparate variety of companies, large and small, are reporting sporadically on carbon but in a way that is singularly unuseful in tracking progress over time or making comparisons between businesses, it staggers me that we are still talking about some sort of discussion and consultation, with a timescale within which to reach a view about whether there will be mandatory reporting by 2012. All the arguments made by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, are absolutely the case. We not only have the sheriff with his noises off; the noble Lord, Lord Davies, seemed to come clean when he remarked that reporting does not necessarily serve as a good indicator for managing emissions. That gave the game away completely. We need not bother to go out to report, so far as I can tell, because the Government seem to have made up their mind. Those graphs in the Stern report on the early reduction in carbon emissions were the most telling; it is not what we do by 2050, but what we do in the next five years, that counts. However, we are going to faff about for four of those five years trying to make up our minds whether some of the biggest companies in this country—which, by reducing their carbon emissions, will benefit by cost-reduction and developing technologies that will serve them well in the global market—should simply write down in some reasonably standard way the product of the work that they inevitably will have to do if we are to hit the carbon-reduction targets. I cannot believe how pusillanimous the Government are being on this issue.