I thank my noble friend the Minister. I absolutely agree that there is a lot of very good work going on within the department and some of the other government or public sector organisations providing support in this area that she has referred to. I do not see that as in any way contradictory to the benefits of bringing in this sort of amendment. In being prepared to withdraw it today, I would ask the Government to consider the benefits of introducing an amendment of this kind at a later stage in the consideration of the Bill. This is such a centrally important issue that it merits introduction to the Bill, for the reasons that I have mentioned. I will not go over all those reasons again, but we need to say that it is important and include it in the Bill, in the same way as we think that decarbonisation is important—and a number of us want to include a target in the Bill for decarbonisation.
I was interested in the comment from the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, that she is not particularly keen on targets, because I thought that the issue of targets was pretty central to the arguments coming from the Opposition Bench in relation to its criticism of the Bill. When I first came into government in Scotland in 1999—and the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, referred to that—one issue that we had to deal with in coalition negotiations was the enormous number of targets that the Labour Party wanted to introduce into every aspect of government. At that time, there was a general view in Scotland and in my party that we could do with slimming down considerably the number of targets that the new Labour Party—bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in 1997—came surging forward with in its early days of government.