Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I fear that I shall disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, on the specific questions that he asked. We had good debates on this issue in Committee and on Report, but your Lordships’ House spoke clearly on the question. We now have Clause 25 in the Bill and we think it is right to leave it to the other place to consider it. Amendment No. 6 has come late in the day and there has been no time to consider it across government. Unlike in the other place, starred amendments in this place are debated the day after they are tabled. In the other place, this amendment would not even have been selected because it was tabled only on Friday for a debate on Monday. Therefore, I have been party to no discussions about the amendment. The discussions about how the Government will deal with the Bill in the other place have only just started and my colleagues there said to me, ““We want to wait until you’ve finished with it because we don’t know what else will happen””. As noble Lords saw from the earlier debate, we came close to making another major change to the Bill. Therefore, positions have not been set and lines in the sand have not been drawn. Basically, as will be seen, we have confined the Government’s amendments at Third Reading to ones that conform to the rules of your Lordships’ House—that is, they are just tidying-up amendments. We would not have brought back a large, substantive amendment on this issue even if we had a fixed position on it, because that would have been outside the rules. Our initial analysis of the amendment is that it adds very little, if anything, to the framework of the Bill. Nothing in the Bill, including in Clause 25, prevents overachievement of the budget set out in Clause 5. That is what I said earlier and it is what the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said. The key question for any Government in setting a budget under Clause 5 will be the costs and the benefits of any of the given budget levels. Any restriction on the use of overseas credits would be a relevant factor in that calculation, but this relates to the setting of budgets rather than meeting them or even going beyond them, if it is desired. This does not change our view that the issue should be considered in the other place and, therefore, I am in no position to bring a considered view on this to the House this afternoon.