Climate Change Act 2008 (2050 Target Amendment) Order 2019
Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Lilley(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Deben
I did not say what the noble Lord said; I said that on each occasion we have had a target—of 60%, 80% and now 100%—the estimates of the Global Warming Policy Foundation have been wrong. I have looked very carefully at the foundation’s website; we have checked everything it says, and in each case it is not right about the figures.
As for the BEIS figures or the Chancellor’s figures, I merely say that we have spent many months producing the best figure that can be produced. I have still to understand the basis, in science or economics, of any other figure produced. I have discovered that those Global Warming Policy Foundation figures that I have been able to discern are much less accurate than those we were asked for, spent months producing and have given to the Government. I suggest that we stick to the proven figures rather than those which fit other people’s views.
Lord Lilley (Con)
Before my noble friend sits down, has he read the document in my hand? It states that the cumulative cost of the Climate Change Act up to 2030 would be £3 billion. The document was produced and published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, written by me and drawn entirely from the Government’s published figures, which my noble friend’s committee has never refuted, rebutted or criticised.
Lord Deben
I would hate to refute, rebut and criticise my friend at so late a point in my speech, but he has only just returned from asking a question that included all those points while admitting that he had not actually read the Committee on Climate Change report.
Lord Deben
He may have read it now, but he asked prejudiced questions about it when he had not even read the documents. As far as I can discover, no member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation has ever been to any of the presentations we have made of these documents. I really wish they would have an argument with us on the facts.
Lord Lilley
Yes. That is not a point I have made, but I acknowledge that the noble Baroness is right to rebuke whoever did make it. I am not opposing this measure; I am demanding an impact assessment, one that covers the aggregate. The Minister’s response is that we will get a cost-benefit analysis of individual measures, as the noble Baroness referred to. I just think we ought to know what the rough total is, as assessed by the Treasury. I am not alone in this; I call in aid my noble friend Lord Deben. He rightly said that I should have read the CCC report in its entirety, rather than just the summary, before I asked my question. Now that I have read it in its entirety—I did so without losing the will to live at any point—I know that it calls for a full impact assessment by Her Majesty’s Treasury. I am endorsing that call.
Lord Deben
As it was me who was asked the question, I remind my noble friend that what we said was that the Treasury should look at the distribution of the cost to make sure it was fairly spread. That is a different thing from what my noble friend is asking for.
Lord Lilley
My recollection is the words, “look at the cost, and in particular the distribution”, which seems sensible. I endorse both aspects of my noble friend’s appeal to the Treasury.
Equivalence Determinations for Financial Services and Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment etc) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019
Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Lilley(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Lilley (Con)
My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, will not be shocked to hear that as I have wandered through the corridors of this place, I have heard some noble Lords expressing the view that they are a little tired of his obsession with the statutory instruments. I hope that he will not be even more shocked to know that I am coming to his defence. I think that he is doing an important job and is highlighting one of the great benefits of Brexit. He is bringing to our attention the fact that, after 45 years when we have had to accept these accumulating piles of statutory instruments with scarcely a debate, with no possibility of rejection—that is why there has been no debate—with no hope of altering or amending, which is why we have not, up to now, considered any of the statutory instruments, now, because of Brexit, we are able to do so because, to coin a phrase, we are taking back control of our laws. We should be grateful to the noble Lord for being a convert to this. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents than over 99 just men who have no need of repentance—and I rejoice with him.
Along with the noble Baroness, I have the privilege of sitting on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee of your Lordships’ House, which goes through these regulations and changes to ensure that they accord with what they are supposed to accord with, to highlight any aspect of them which we think needs to be brought to the attention of the House and, if need be, to upgrade them. I have to say that it has been a revelation to me to see the scope, scale, detail and complexity of legislation which, in the past, has been implemented simply because it is EU legislation. Even if the whole House had rejected it, it would still have become the law of the land.
The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is right to be concerned about several things. He is right to be concerned about consultation, because now consultation will matter. There will be some point in listening to what people think about statutory instruments because we will, in extremis, be able to reject them, and certainly to suggest to the Government that they might choose to do things differently, and it will be possible for them to do so.
The noble Lord is also right to point to the need for impact assessments and measures of cost. My noble friend Lord Deben—another great convert to Brexit—pointed out that these were important and suggested that the failure to cost these things was because the Treasury was anxious to hide them. I can tell him that today our committee considered one measure which concerned the European budget. We suggested that there should be a costing of that, because there would be a saving of between £10 billion and £12 billion net from no longer being part of the European Community if we leave without a withdrawal agreement on 29 March.
Lord Deben
I do not quite understand how we can know the net saving if we have not estimated the actual cost of any of these statutory instruments. That, surely, is the issue. Although we all understand my noble friend’s very amusing and charming way of putting it, many of us realise that the reason why we have these things in this form is that it gives us real equivalence. The problem we are now faced with is that we have fake equivalence. We decide what we want, but if others are not prepared to go along with it, our financial industry will be very much disadvantaged.
Lord Lilley
I am trying to get the full gist of my noble friend’s intervention, which was, first, that he seemed to think that the cost of all the statutory instruments which have not been costed—although many of them have—might somehow accumulate to anything approaching the £10 billion to £12 billion a year net contribution that we will save as a result of this one statutory instrument that we have been discussing in the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee today, which will remove us from the EU budget. If he thinks that they are on that scale, I invite him to name one that might be worth £1 billion, for example. I suspect that he will not be able to do so.
My noble friend went on to talk about equivalence, which is important and can be valuable; that is the substance of this SI. It is worth the House remembering that equivalent regulation is not as important as superior regulation. It is far more important for this country to have good regulation—that is, the best in the world, which is not to say the most detailed or intrusive regulation but effective, appropriate, not-too-onerous regulation that ensures good quality of business. That has been the City’s great strength over the years. Better regulation than other countries has often been more important than identical regulation. The Eurodollar market is in London, not New York, because of bad regulation in America: Regulation Q, or whatever it was, drove all the business out of America. Our success in the trade in German state bonds was because the majority of it took place in London, due to our regulatory system being superior to the Germans’ before we introduced the single market and they had to improve theirs somewhat. Likewise, we carried out a high proportion of the trade in French equities because our regulatory system was superior, rather than identical, to that of France.
We should remember that the four great financial centres in the world—New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and London—all have something equivalent to each other and are great financial centres because they have in common common law and all the infrastructure built on that, such as legal and accounting processes, which make them flexible and desirable places to do business. In effect, they outpaced countries with different legal systems. We should welcome equivalence where appropriate but be very glad that we will not have to have regulation identical to that of our friends and partners on the continent. It is almost certainly beneficial to London to be a rule-maker, not a rule-taker.