It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, with his expertise in this field, and other campaigners with significant expertise. It adds to the calibre of the debate. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Young, I think that this is the SI where I have most concern about the paucity of the targets. I also found it very interesting just how much support there was for increasing the level of ambition, yet the Government have gone down from what they originally proposed.
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The noble Baroness asked what has changed since the Government originally had their consultation and felt that 17.5% was achievable. The Minister keeps saying that they would not have set targets that were not achievable; they would not have set that as the consultation baseline if that was not the case. Yet during the consultation, it went down to 16.5%. She makes a good point, and I hope that he can today say why exactly they felt that they could no longer achieve a target which had seemed perfectly reasonable at the beginning of the consultation. If we as parliamentarians cannot understand that, the Government cannot really go forward in thinking about possible solutions. The noble Baroness mentioned ELMS. It may well be that the delay in getting that up and running has been part of it, but it would be good for the Minister to say, “We had a target of 17.5%, but it went down to 16.5% during the consultation”, and give the reason why.
I will not repeat the many questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Young, but she made one point without a question—on the relationship of this with the Climate Change Committee’s figure of 18% by 2050—so I will add a question to it. I appreciate that Scotland has a role in meeting that figure, because it is an all-UK figure but, by bringing it down to 16.5% the Government are not supporting the balanced pathway, which has been introduced by the Climate Change Committee and is related to the targets that the Government have agreed to on our carbon emissions by 2050.
Given that the Government will refresh their net-zero strategy in the next couple of months, what contribution will Defra make in light of the fact that it will not now produce the amount of carbon emissions savings it was hoping to achieve through the target, which was initially hoped to be around 18%, was then 17.5% and has now gone down to 16.5%? What else will it do to meet those carbon savings in the net-zero strategy? Will it upweight waste? It does not sound like that will change much, so what else will Defra produce given that it has brought the targets down so that they are not in line with what the Climate Change Committee has said is the balanced pathway to meet the targets which the Government have now legally agreed to?