Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, when an amendment to Clause 1 was debated on Report, the Minister was rather dismissive of it. He argued that it would weaken the Bill. We now have a new amendment, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. I shall make another attempt to persuade the Minister of its merits. First, the amendment has the merit of elegance and clarity in its drafting. In relation to the targets, it brings together in one place at the beginning of the Bill the things that the Secretary of State has a duty to do from the original Clause 1 and the things that the Secretary of State must do under new Clauses 13 and 14. That will make the Bill’s purpose much clearer and the way it operates more logical. Secondly, the Minister argued on Report that the amendment would weaken the Bill. It could be said that the Government draft is stronger because it relates the duty directly to the final objective set for 2050, but in my view this is illusory. The link with the 2050 target is an indirect one, depending not only on what the Secretary of State does, but also on how society responds. As a result many legal experts, some of them in this House, have cast doubt on whether the Secretary of State could successfully be challenged in law. The amendment is superior, in the view of many, because it relates the duty to those things a Secretary of State actually does—developing policies and implementing them—and not to something that a Secretary of State does not actually do, which is emit CO2. The test then becomes one of whether the actions or omissions of the Secretary of State are reasonable in relation to the objective. That looks to me like a proposition that a court could handle. The Minister also argued that one of the purposes of the Bill is to require departments and their civil servants to look continuously at whether their actions could be challenged in law, thereby evoking the famous JOYS booklet, The Judge Over Your Shoulder, first published in 1987 and now in its fourth edition. Again, this would be more effective if it related to what civil servants actually do in terms of giving policy advice, enforcing regulations and so forth, as the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, explained. The purpose must be connected to the objectives of the department and those of individual civil servants. Thirdly, the new Clause 2 brings greater and more continuous pressure of enforcement. At present there are to be two channels, the first of which is political accountability. If any of the targets for the five-year carbon accounts are missed or look like being missed, the Government must report to Parliament on why and what they are going to do about them. The second channel is the threat of legal challenge for failure to meet the duty to deliver the objective for 2050. But this really begins to bite only when 2050 comes into sight and it becomes undeniable that the target will be missed. The advantage of the amendment is that the duty will apply to the quinquennial targets as well as to that for 2050, so bringing the political and legal enforcement processes into line. The defect in the Bill which this amendment addresses has not just come to light. It was identified last year by the Joint Committee on which many of your Lordships served, and while the introduction by the Government of what are now Clauses 13 and 14 go some way to rectifying the fault, in my view they do not go far enough. Therefore I hope very much that the Government will complete the process by agreeing to adopt this amendment and refining it if necessary during the Bill’s passage through the Commons.