Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Crickhowell most warmly on the assiduousness with which he has pursued this issue over, I dare say, the 10 months to which the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, referred a moment ago, but certainly through all the proceedings in the House. I am not a veteran of the pre-legislative scrutiny but, as I said on Report, I was the only parliamentarian from this Parliament who sat through the entire CPA conference on global warming which took place in the last week of November last year. In the context of the claim which the Government properly and reasonably make that we are setting an example and are the first Government to legislate—an issue to which my noble friend Lord Crickhowell referred—exactly that claim was made by the government spokesman early in the conference. Its global universality is one of the virtues of the Commonwealth and, after he had left, some of us smiled as a series of Ministers from what I will call the smaller island territories said that the situation was so threatening and so imminent for them that they had already carried through such legislation as was required, and at least 10 had full-scale plans at a much higher state of advancement than anything we can claim. It is therefore important that the example the Government set out to give should be as good as possible. If my noble friend’s amendment improves it still further, that is all to the good. I do not propose—I said I would not do it on Report and I shall not do it now—to go through the British Library experience to which I alluded in Committee. However, it still remains with me. The test of any Secretary of State during the 20 years that the British Library was being constructed was that he or she would be held responsible for the exact state of the business. However, in view of the fact that the Government’s insistence on the wording which is currently in the Bill prior to my noble friend’s amendment has so concentrated Whitehall’s mind, I will say—I did not say this in Committee—that when the construction had been going on for 15 years and book cases were being installed in the cellar of the British Library, the book cases developed a habit of ejecting the books and putting them on the floor, which in the concept of a flagship library is not a wholly satisfactory development. I was sent into battle armed with a happy Q & A: Question: ““Secretary of State, why is it that the shelves are throwing the books on the floor?”” Answer: ““Shelves, being inanimate objects, cannot throw anything””. Anything that can be done to reinforce the Government’s position is good. I am a warm supporter of my noble friend’s amendment.