Energy Bill [HL]

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I agree with my noble friend Lady Maddock about the involvement of local authorities. I know from conversations with the Minister and other Ministers that this is very much in the Government’s mind. I welcome the fact that, as I hope they will, local authorities will be integrated into the process.

I want to talk about carbon budgets. Reducing carbon, as we talked about with regard to the Climate Change Act, is fundamental, but I just do not think that local carbon budgets are the right instrument to do that. There is huge pressure on local government finance at the moment, so I would agree that because of that—I declare that I am a member of a local authority—local authorities are starting to concentrate on activities where they have statutory obligations. Where they do not, they are having to consider rather more. If there were a more perfect way of doing this, I would like to see some statutory obligation generally in terms of climate change in a broader sense. However, I fundamentally believe that it should then be left to local authorities to decide how they implement and deliver that, and that they should have the powers to do so.

I spent a huge amount of time in this House two or three years ago on the Climate Change Bill. We spent a huge amount of time working out how national budgets could work. We looked at all the difficulties regarding air transportation, imports and exports and—maybe more esoterically, but importantly—whether carbon consumption was more important than carbon production. We looked at the transfers of budgets between years and at all the other sorts of mechanisms that there are. We considered what happens in terms of the EU ETS, transfers of that in or out and how it worked. We gave particular thought to air and shipping.

If you bring that down to local authorities—many parts of the country still have not one tier of local authority but two, so you have to add them up and they will not come to the national budget anyway—you have the issues of transportation, such as motorways being major emitters. The easiest way to mitigate those would be to stop industry coming into your local authority and get it to go the other side of your local authority boundary. If you took this seriously, you would have all sorts of weird incentives whose outcomes would be perverse.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I have thought about this point for some time. Is it not a fact that one of the possible anomalies in the whole discussion going back to the Climate Change Bill is that carbon budgeting and financial budgeting in the traditional sense do not correspond? That has to be done at some point or the whole thing will get out of sync. Does the noble Lord agree that you need a clear analysis of how carbon budgeting corresponds with financial budgeting at national level before you discuss it at other levels?

[Lord Teverson]

I would probably agree with the noble Lord on that matter. However, I do not want to prolong this discussion as we want to get through the Bill. Although it is vital that we reduce carbon emissions and local authorities need to play a key part in that, that objective should be a statutory obligation on them which is outside this Bill. They should have a much greater connection with the Climate Change Committee which should have a local authority aspect. It would be great if local authorities wanted to engage in a modified form of carbon budgeting.