My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for introducing the instrument and congratulate Defra on having gone live with the system and being much more successful than the Department for Transport with its ferries—hypothetical as they were.
This is a serious subject, so I will not make light of it. We are delighted that the statutory instrument will maintain the continuity of the ambitious targets that are necessary. In researching this, I reminded myself how much more warming fluorinated gasses are than CO2: 23,000 times. The Minister said that it is more powerful. I had to check the figure several times because it seems very large, but they are extremely powerful substances. Ozone-depleting substances were one of the first things on which the world got together and decided to act—very successfully, it seemed.
However, in researching this I also came across a disturbing fact discovered by the University of Bristol, which is that some 40,000 tonnes of carbon tetrachloride are still being emitted, although not by anywhere that Defra is responsible for because it seems to be in the Shandong province of China. However, maybe the FCO would like to take that up, because although the EU and the UK are doing their bit, it seems that China is still emitting 40,000 tonnes of this extremely damaging chemical. You can use it in the production of chlorine, but again, that is a staggering figure. The noble Baroness told us about the continuing search for less damaging alternatives; I think the protocol also agrees that we should allow equipment to continue for its useful life so that we are not replacing things unnecessarily but that at the end of its life, we should go for something that involves a less damaging gas.
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I want to ask about a couple of things in the regulations. The noble Baroness kindly explained the UK quota system, which will be UK-wide, and the Environment Agency will negotiate that with the devolved Administrations. However, what happens in the event that the devolved Administrations disagree about how much quota they get? Does she foresee that that will be an issue? The noble Baroness also mentioned that EU-certified technicians will be able to continue to work in the UK, but will it work the other way round—will UK-certified technicians be able to work in the EU? I understand that access to the EU quotas will require an office being set up in the EU to negotiate them and administrate that process. It would be useful to know whether that exchange of technical personnel will be reciprocal, and to know about the quotas. However, other than that, I hope that by 2030, we will have achieved our targets and perhaps even done better than that and moved past them. It concerns me that, according to the University of Bristol study, other areas of the world continue to emit such vast amounts of something that is so damaging to the atmosphere.