Climate Change Act 2008 (2020 Target, Credit Limit and Definitions) Order 2009

My Lords, we are very grateful to my noble friend Lord Lawson for challenging the Government on the orders. All too often, statutory instruments—orders—slip through even though they have big implications. This one has mega-implications. I do not want to make many points, but I start off with one fact. It is staggering—as anyone who begins to understand how the system should work would agree—that the impact assessment for what is probably the most expensive piece of legislation ever passed, the Climate Change Act 2008, was produced only after the Bill had become an Act. Yet the idea of an impact assessment has always been that it helps good governance because you can see the cost and the consequences of legislating. What sort of government is that? Bad government, bad government, bad government. What is the size of the impact assessment? It is £400 billion. As my noble friend pointed out, that estimate does not necessarily include everything. Have the Government really lost all sense of proportion of money? That £400 billion is 27 per cent of GDP. It is 50 per cent of the public sector net debt. Public sector net debt has already reached £792 billion, so £400 billion is half of that. It is 60 per cent of total government spending for this year, yet gaily they produce a £400 billion impact assessment as though it was all perfectly natural. The Act is thoroughly pernicious. I particularly criticise the fact that with gay abandon the Government produce this sort of legislation when they have not been doing the things that they could have. We all agree that it is much better to reduce the use of oil and reduce carbon emissions. However, they have taken 10 years even to decide to go ahead with nuclear power. They have only now produced the list of places where they might have nuclear power stations. They have taken 10 years to do that. The Government are not even clear whether nuclear power is a renewable. I believe that it is, to all intents and purposes. The noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, speaking ex cathedra from the Front Bench as Science Minister, said that it was a renewable. He said that; it is all in Hansard, so the Minister need not shake his head. He was of course made to renege, because the green lobby does not like nuclear power. Recently, the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, who now occupies an exalted post in the Government—and he is a splendid fellow to have there—referred to, ""nuclear power and other renewables".—[Official Report, 8/12/08; col. 160.]" I happened to speak in that debate and drew attention to those felicitous words, which have not been denied. However, I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, will get up and say that the Government do not regard nuclear power as a renewable. The sad thing is that this Government are going into something alone, probably alone in Europe, as President Obama is most unlikely to be prepared to commit the United States to anything like the scale of what we are attempting to commit this country to, unless the world does so. However, the chances of the world doing so are remote in the extreme. I am delighted that we are challenging this sloppy thinking by this sloppy Government.