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Amendment of the law

I had not spotted that item, and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for drawing it to my attention. There are, of course, many bear traps in the area of biofuels. Unless we implement sustainability criteria, we could contribute to global warming rather than prevent it. The Climate Change Committee says that aviation must face an appropriate cost for carbon to provide an incentive for supply-side abatement and demand constraint. The background to the third runway decision was a fiddled version of the shadow price of carbon, which deviated from Sir Nicholas Stern's proposed formula and, specifically, his discount rate. Perhaps the Secretary of State should seek the committee's advice on the appropriate cost of carbon and how exactly one can constrain demand for aviation while building extra runways at our biggest airports. On carbon capture and storage, we heard the Chancellor's statement yesterday and have heard and read the Secretary of State's announcements and documents today. The announcements sound great—a bigger, better competition and an apparent commitment to all coal-fired power stations being 100 per cent. retrofitted with carbon capture and storage by 2025, but the vital escape clause is that it is""subject to the technology being ready"." If it is not ready, the unabated power station will not be shut down and will continue to belch out far more greenhouse gases than any available alternative. In the accompanying document, much is made of carbon capture-readiness. A friend once told me that carbon capture-ready is a bit like paving one's front garden and declaring it Ferrari-ready—aspirational, but no real guarantee of success. How right she was. Lord Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, the Government's own environmental advisers, was also right. The agency rejected the idea of building coal-fired power stations that can be fitted with CCS technology later, claiming that it would be""insufficient for the climate change challenge that we face"." There are some other genuinely welcome steps in the Budget, of which the extra incentive to offshore wind energy through increased renewable obligations certificates is one, but there are also some strange steps in completely the wrong direction. Was the push to exploit new oil and gas reserves the Secretary of State's idea, or has big oil been talking to the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform? Does the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform carry more clout with No. 10 and the Treasury than the Secretary of State who is here today? I suspect that he might. It all sounds a bit more Bush than Obama. A great deal was missing from the rest of the Budget, such as an admission that the Government have got some things plain wrong. For example, it is absolutely irresponsible to waste £1 billion a month on a VAT cut that hardly anyone has noticed. The Budget also lacks any serious measures to help us adapt to climate change. I notice in the detail, because it affects my constituency in particular, that the £800 million flood budget is being supplemented by a £20 million increase, although the increase will be brought forward only from next year, when there will presumably be a compensating cut. The Budget does not include a scheme to compensate those communities located in counties such as Norfolk that face much faster than expected coastal erosion, perhaps in large part due to the action of climate change. Landfill tax keeps increasing, placing a burden on local authorities, which might be acceptable if there were corresponding help for some of the programmes that have been cut drastically in recent years, such as the national industrial symbiosis programme, the waste recycling action programme, Envirowise, the Carbon Trust, the Energy Saving Trust and the small and much neglected Partnerships for Renewables. The latter was set up to help public sector bodies deliver renewable energy locally at no cost to them. The scheme is exciting and innovative, but it has had precious little support so far.