Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Government for moving somewhat on my Amendment No. 8. We have tabled an amendment of our own to highlight that the Government could move further. I doubt that the NCC feels that the government amendment gives enough emphasis to the extreme importance of the sustainability duties. The NCC’s recent work, for example, has clearly had a significant effect. A while ago, my honourable friend Norman Baker published How Green Is Your Supermarket?. The answer for all was, ““Not at all””—the word ““green”” never crossed their minds. The NCC recently published a report called Greening Supermarkets, which addressed a wide range of issues and encouraged supermarkets to start to take action. We have seen headlines about supermarkets vying with each other to prove their green credentials, but they are still far from green. The Government will know that among the issues that still hang over how green a supermarket can ever be are the number of car journeys made to and from it and the amount of food being trucked up and down Britain’s roads. However, the issues raised by the NCC’s report have been immensely influential and underline how such a body can help consumers as a whole to encourage suppliers to change completely how they think about such issues. The Government are resisting my amendment, which requires the NCC to, "““develop policies and discharge its duties so that it contributes””. " It is much firmer than the Government’s amendment, which leaves it to the NCC to judge. So if push came to shove and the NCC was not exercising its functions in that manner—a scenario I cannot envisage when it is under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty,—and sustainability did not seem to be a big issue for it, how would the Government judge whether the council was doing enough? We know from debates on this matter that climate change will not go away. It is bound to be important, yet the pulls on the NCC may not always be about it; they may be about price. That is where some of the biggest tensions will come from, especially in the field of energy, where there will be tension between maintaining as low a price as possible and some microgeneration issues—I shall not go down that path. How will the Government ensure that,despite their somewhat strengthened amendment, sustainability will be at the heart of what the NCC does?