Climate Change and SustainableEnergy Bill

I fully appreciate that point and am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making it. However, I have noticed that the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst has a certain influence on other Members, to which the hon. Member for Christchurch may be particularly well able to attest. Climate change is an urgent issue. I was especially pleased that the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) mentioned the gulf stream or, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) said, the thermohaline circulation. The UK faces not the advantageous outcome of gentle global warming in the south of England that allows us all to grow vines in our gardens but, were the gulf stream to switch off, a fall in average temperatures of between 4o and 6o, and perhaps as much as 10o in the winter. Recent research by Harry Bryden and his team at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, Europe’s largest and pre-eminent marine research centre, found that there had been a substantial fall in the strength of the gulf stream since 1992. I very much hope that it is being affected by short-term considerations, but it certainly underlines the urgency of tackling climate change and the importance of addressing it politically. The Bill contains useful measures. It sets targets and asks Ministers to report on them, and it enables Ministers to take action on a series of measures, including microgeneration and energy efficiency. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham, I regret that some provisions have been dropped, especially those on renewable heat obligations. I hope that some of what remains, including some of the elements introduced by the Government with a degree of caution, will not be used; for example, I urge the Minister to tell us that he does not intend, in current circumstances, to use subsection (2) of clause 4. It provides that subsection (1), which allows the Secretary of State to set national microgeneration targets,"““does not apply unless on 1st November 2008 the Secretary of State considers that it would be appropriate to designate one or more targets under that subsection””." It is an all-purpose let-out and I hope that it has been included only for emergencies—genuine cases where the Government are not able to proceed, rather than something that they intend to trigger early on. Generally, there are some useful measures in the Bill. I particularly hope that the Government will avail themselves of the powers that they would be given under clause 7, to enable the buy-back of surplus electricity from microgeneration schemes, because that would make an enormous difference to the incentives, about which we have heard from a number of hon. Members, for households to install such equipment. It would make a lot of sense for the Government to encourage energy efficiency. We know, and I hope that it will be properly reflected in the Minister’s energy review, when it is published, that energy efficiency schemes are possibly among the most efficient ways to fill any gap in the supply of electricity. I think that there is only one source of energy for the generation of electricity that is even more economical than the National Audit Office has found energy efficiency schemes to be: onshore wind power. I therefore hope that that is firmly in the mix, and the Bill would indeed allow that. For example, it would also allow the Government to designate, under the permitted development order powers, the installation of wind turbines automatically. Given the importance of this issue, it seem nonsense that we can install Sky television dishes, but not wind turbines under existing powers. Clause 19 is also excellent, and I commend it to the House because it deals with community energy schemes. It would be particularly important in ensuring that local communities are in favour of onshore wind schemes and that they can participate sometimes in the benefits and certainly in the process of consultation before the construction of such schemes. An example of that is the Gigha scheme in Scotland, which has gone very smoothly. We have heard a lot from hon. Members on both sides of the House about the difficulties that occasionally arise about specific schemes, and those provisions could be one of the ways to resolve them. A central theme of the Bill is the possibility of proceeding rapidly with decentralisation. We have also heard from hon. Members about the amount of waste that occurs in the generation of electricity from fossil fuels. Roughly a fifth of energy actually reaches the end-user and can be used usefully, once waste heat during the generating process, waste in transmission and waste in end-use are taken into account. The localisation and decentralisation of electricity generation makes an awful lot of sense. Of course the problem is that it is not the sort of solution that naturally appeals to civil servants sitting in Whitehall who like a big bang and who like to be able to wave a magic wand and say that they have the magic bullet and the magic solution. It is inevitably a solution that involves the activity of many millions of people, but given the technological progress that we have made, it is a very important solution, and I welcome the powers granted in the Bill that would help to achieve it. That brings me to my final point, as I am also aware that other hon. Members want to speak and that time marches on. There is a growing recognition throughout the House, shown by the signatories to the cross-party agreement of five parties on climate change and evident among Government Members, that action is needed urgently. Certainly, the recent remarks of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs suggest that there is a growing realisation that we need to act urgently on this issue and that the Government and we as legislators must set a clear framework in which people can operate. This is a classic collective action problem. If someone stands up when watching a football match, the person behind has to stand up, and before we know it, everyone is standing up and no one has a better view. If we can reach a genuine assurance that everyone should continue to sit down, that everyone should save energy and that everyone should be prepared to charge their behaviour in most ways—not by disporting an excessive hair shirt—we can make real progress on climate change, albeit in a country that is responsible for only about 2 per cent. of carbon emissions globally. Our standing in the international community and our ability to argue in the European Union and more widely for radical international measures depend on our ability to set a clear example. There is an enormous advantage both for consumers of energy and for people who are developing the new technologies of our being the first mover, recognising and adjusting to a new world where climate change is taken extremely seriously. With those thoughts, the Liberal Democrats very much support the measure. We congratulate the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith on its progress, and we very much hope that it will reach the statute book in short order.