That this House takes note of the level of preparation by His Majesty’s Government in adapting to the impacts that climate change will have on health, the economy, food security, and the environment.
My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the advisory board of the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. I am most grateful to the Cross-Benchers who chose this topic for one of our two debates today, and I am delighted that the noble Earl, Lord Russell, has chosen this debate for his maiden speech. I welcome him to the Chamber and very much look forward to hearing his contribution later on.
This debate could not be happening at a more appropriate moment. On the one hand, we are seeing record-breaking heatwaves across the world, in Europe, the US and China. We know with a high degree of confidence that the likelihood of these events has increased already as result of manmade climate change. Professor Fredi Otto of Imperial College said to me last week: “The bottom line is that these events in the US and Europe are not rare today—about one in 10-year events—but would have been extremely rare if it was not for climate change”.
Against this backdrop, last week the Government published their third national adaptation plan—or NAP3 for short—which sets out how the UK will prepare itself for the inevitable impacts of climate change that will result from the greenhouse gases humanity has already pumped into the atmosphere. As we all know, the global response to climate change has two strands: there is the commitment, starting with the Paris Agreement in 2015, to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees; at the same time, there is the need to prepare for the inevitability of climate change to which we are already committed, however good we are at cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
This debate is about the second of these two strands: adaptation rather than mitigation. The UK has an excellent process for developing an adaptation plan. The adaptation sub-committee of the Committee on Climate Change, of which I was the chair between 2009 and 2017, prepares an independent evidence report on the present and future risks to the UK from climate change: the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment evidence report. Based on this risk assessment, the Government then publish a national adaptation plan, or NAP, which aims to set out how the country will respond to the risks identified in the Climate Change Risk Assessment. This process is repeated on a five-yearly cycle.
Unfortunately, up to now, this excellent process has not been matched by action. The first two national adaptation plans were woefully inadequate. In March, the Climate Change Committee said that England is not prepared for climate risks and we have lost a decade to inaction. For no adaptation outcome—of the 45 examined in the progress report—do we find evidence of good progress in the delivery and implementation of adaptation policy on the ground. This is a truly shocking assessment of the failure of the Government to take climate adaptation seriously.
We know that climate adaptation is not a priority for this Government, because when the Prime Minister set out his five key priorities for 2023, climate change was not among them. The press is now reporting that the Prime Minister is being urged to ditch or dilute green policies, and today the Prime Minister himself appeared to confirm this.
My Lords, I declare an interest as an unpaid trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, an educational charity in this area.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for securing this debate. We have all too little debate on climate change and it is all the more important we have it now, since critics of any aspect of this policy find it increasingly difficult to get a hearing in the media. Here in this House, at least, we cannot be censored—though it seems that we run some risk of losing our bank accounts if we dare to speak up.
It is crucial, as we debate this, that we do so in a measured and rational fashion. I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister’s comments today suggest that that might be beginning to happen in government. We must put aside the current mood of hysteria and try to assess the choices logically.
When people like me argue about the costs of mitigating climate change, we are often told: “There is no choice. Not acting costs even more”. I question that. Of course temperatures are increasing, slowly, and that will have consequences, but there is another choice, and that is what we are debating today—adaptation.
Let us look at the relative costs and benefits of the two routes. Let us look at the macro level first. The Skidmore net-zero review earlier this year asserted that the costs of mitigation would be 1% to 2% of GDP per year—that is £25 billion to £50 billion sterling—though other studies say it will be quite a lot more than that. Moreover, unless everyone else in the world is willing to bear the same costs, our spending that much will have precisely zero effect on the global climate.
In contrast, look at adaptation. It is not easy to find hard figures about the costs of adaptation but, if we look at the 2021 technical report on this, prepared for the Climate Change Committee in 2021, we see that it shows the cost of adaptation as only £8 billion a year by 2050 and £13 billion to £20 billion, non-discounted, as far out as 2080—and by then, I hope, that will be a very small proportion of our GDP. The orders of magnitude of those figures surely suggest that adaptation might actually be a more productive route than mitigation. I therefore agree with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that more will need to be spent on things such as flood protection and reservoirs.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for his introduction and attention to this issue, on which he is always clear and relates all the different effects of climate change. I am afraid I cannot be quite so complimentary about the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Frost. The idea that we have a choice between mitigation and adaptation is absurd. We need both. As to the current furore in the newspapers over the weekend, after a by-election in which 250 people voted the wrong way, there is pressure on the leaders of our two main parties to back off from their commitment to green policies and tackling climate change. I find that absolutely absurd. I hope that the leaders of both parties will resist it, and I believe they will.
In Glasgow 18 months ago, Britain was seen to be taking a lead on reductions in fossil fuels. Commitments to adaptation were less clear, but nevertheless they were there. There was a minimalist contribution by rich nations to help the adaptation of more vulnerable, usually poorer, nations. Since then, we have gone backwards as a country in terms of UK leadership and as a globe as whole. The recent Climate Change Committee report—the last from the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and I pay tribute to his work and look forward to what he has to say—clearly shows, as do the other reports referred to, that Britain is not on track to achieve net zero or to have adapted to the warmer, more dangerous world that will ensue, and nor is the world on that check.
We have seen the results in heatwaves, high temperatures, wildfires, melting ice caps and disappearing glaciers. Sea temperatures and levels rise, while at the same time we have seen a loss of reliable rainfall and fresh water. We will now not, frankly, meet the target of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees—the Paris target. Nor will we restrain it to 2 degrees. The more off course we are for mitigating global warming, the more essential is the need to prioritise and pay for adaptation, with significant investment and major economic and societal behaviour change. The longer we continue to burn fossil fuels, drive diesel cars and cut down trees, the more expensive and difficult that adaptation becomes.
My Lords, I listened to the “Thought for the Day” programme this morning, where the theologian likened the politicians’ retreat to the position of St Augustine. But, in this context, “not yet” is too late.
My Lords, I declare my interest as a director of Peers for the Planet. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for tabling this much-needed debate and for his very knowledgeable introduction. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome my noble friend Lord Russell, with whom I have had the pleasure to work on at least two campaigns for the London elections. I look forward very much to his maiden speech, which I know will be excellent.
It used to be that extreme climate change events mainly threatened lives in low-lying developing countries, where weak structures were swept away by floodwaters and desertification was a food and water issue for the famine-stricken countries of the Sahel. However, today, in a few short years the narrative has changed, particularly in the richer countries of the world. Who, before a few years ago, had heard of heat domes or atmospheric rivers? Frighteningly, these heat domes are covering larger areas in the US, Europe and Asia than ever before. According to NASA, atmospheric rivers are forecast to become more frequent, longer and wider.
The global temperature rise is already nearing 1.2 degrees centigrade, yet fossil fuels emissions are still increasing. According to the IEA, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions grew by 0.9% or 321 megatons last year, reaching a new high of over 36.8 gigatons.
Time per speaker is short for this debate, but it is essential to spend a little time to appreciate the context within which adaptation to extreme events is urgent. Unless we accept that fossil fuel emissions must be stopped as soon as humanly possible, it will be too late to act, and we will render vast swathes of our planet uninhabitable. The climate change deniers—reincarnated as climate change delayers—have much to answer for. Their insistence that we do not take out insurance to safeguard our planet means that we will lose our no-claims bonus and end up paying inordinately more—and with more than just money. The Government’s NAP3 does not inspire confidence.
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Krebs for the very thoughtful way in which he introduced the debate. I declare my interests as chairman of the King’s Fund and chairman of King’s Health Partners.
I will focus, over the next three minutes or so, on the question of adaptation to climate change and the potential impact on the delivery of healthcare in our country and the health of our fellow citizens. It is quite right to be thoughtful and measured in considering these matters, but there is no doubt that we saw a substantial impact in Europe during the last heatwave of 2022, with the reported excess deaths associated with heat. Indeed, last year we saw in our own country some 2,500 reported excess deaths associated with heat-related conditions.
The impact of climate change can be seen very much as having a multiplying effect on underlying predispositions to poor health outcomes. For instance, a predisposition to heart disease or respiratory conditions can be exacerbated by the impact of alterations in climate. We also know that the nature of the diseases that we will experience as the climate changes in our own country will need to be carefully planned for. For instance, in the future we will see more vector-related diseases, mosquito-related diseases—such as Zika virus and West Nile fever—and, potentially, malaria, if the predictions are correct. Tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme disease, will be seen more frequently. There is an important need to ensure that, with the potential for flooding, other waterborne diseases are properly recognised and can be treated early, and that appropriate public health measures can be employed to mitigate against them.
There is also the question of how the public health system more broadly is to prepare itself. It is clearly important that we have appropriate surveillance mechanisms in place through the Health Protection Agency to identify and to characterise the changing frequency, occurrence and regional distribution of such diseases. With the risk, more broadly, of global climate change comes the establishment of newer zoonotic diseases, as animals and humans are forced to live in much closer proximity. Much of what we learned during the Covid pandemic needs to be retained and applied in a thoughtful and appropriate fashion to ensure that those surveillance mechanisms are in place, so that when diseases occur and when individuals develop those conditions, there can be appropriate measures in place—for instance, establishing the sequence of novel viruses and so on which might occur as a result of those climate impacts.
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The Lord Bishop of Guildford
My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for this timely debate and very much look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Earl, Lord Russell.
The Church Commissioners and the Church of England Pensions Board have recently taken the decision to divest from fossil fuels following insufficient progress towards meeting the targets set by their investment boards in 2018. As the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury put it:
“We have long urged companies to take climate change seriously, and specifically to align with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and pursue efforts to limit the rise in temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels … Some progress has been made, but not nearly enough. The Church will follow not just the science, but our faith—both of which call us to work for climate justice”.
While mitigating the worst impacts of climate change must remain our primary goal—and here I disagree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Frost, especially when we consider the global dimension—the Church and the communities we serve have increasingly recognised the need for adaptation too, not least given the alarmingly rapid rise in so-called freak weather events that are impacting us all, and not simply those in far-flung corners of the globe. Heatwaves, droughts and heavy rainfall have affected every community across the nation in recent years, with the freakish apparently becoming the new normal. Churches have begun to think through how they can adapt so as to provide a base for emergency services, a safe refuge from extreme weather events and a sanctuary from overheating, as well as considering how their buildings might be protected from flooding, subsidence and other severe impacts of the climate crisis.
Many of our churches, including some in my own diocese, are set in predominantly agricultural communities, and I am grateful for today’s debate secured by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Exeter highlighting the housing crisis there and elsewhere. Yet alongside those challenges sits a whole range of adaptation concerns too. The English language, like the Hebrew of the Jewish Bible, has a single root for “human”, “humility” and “humus”—the soil or tilth—reminding us of the complete interdependence between humanity and the soil we cultivate, and the consequent need to treat the planet humbly and with respect. Yet the pressing need for a cohesive strategy for land use to tackle climate-related degradation of the soil and what we grow in it is largely unmet by the Government’s NAP3, leading to unanswered concerns around food security, not least given the equal pressures on other nations on which we have traditionally depended when crops have failed.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for introducing this debate so moderately and reasonably, and I look forward to the maiden speech from the noble Earl, Lord Russell.
I am sure the House will remember that the Global Warming Policy Foundation to which my noble friend Lord Frost adheres used to say that climate change was not happening. Then it said it was happening a bit and now, evidently, it says that it is happening but other people ought to deal with it and we should not be involved at all. We are not talking about that, happily, but I look forward to a debate with my noble friend when I shall be quoting the science and he will be quoting the prejudices.
I have been a businessman all my life—except when I was a Minister—and I am always interested in finding certainties. We have a certainty here: the weather is changing dramatically and we have to sort out our acceptance of it. That means that we cannot talk about deaths, as my noble friend Lord Frost did. I do not think that the families of people who die because of heat are very much cheered by the fact that there are fewer people dying because of cold. The fact is that we have to deal with these problems. We have to do something about our care homes, most—not just many—of which are entirely unsuited for the weather that we are going to have.
We still have not had the future homes legislation to bring new houses up to date. A million and a half crap houses have been built, and the next generation—the people who have paid for them and contributed to the profits of the housebuilders—are the ones who are going to have to change those houses.
We have rising sea levels, but I see very little in this report about how we are going to deal with that. However, I want to concentrate, in my short time, on water. I come from East Anglia, which is now a semi-arid region. The local water company has announced that it cannot produce any connections for new commercial businesses until 2032, because it has not got any water. In south-east England, South East Water has not been able to provide water for quite a number of its people for this part of the year, and we have not got into August yet, nor have we had the kind of withering hot weather we had last year.
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The Climate Change Committee also said in its report last March:
“The next National Adaptation Programme”—
that is NAP3, published about a week ago—
“must make a step change”.
Otherwise,
“it risks another lost five years of ineffectual adaptation action – which the UK’s people, ecosystems and infrastructure cannot afford”.
The Met Office’s most recent fine resolution projections for the UK climate in 2050, called UKCP18, indicate that we will have
“hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters”.
There will be more extreme events, such as flooding and drought, and sea level will continue to rise. The more the average global temperature rises, the more extreme these effects will be.
This means that, with no effective adaptation, which is the path we are on now, it will be like this in a few decades. People will more frequently overheat in their homes, hospitals, care homes and workplaces. We are not retrofitting old buildings, nor are we designing new buildings, to be resilient to overheating. Houses built in flood plains will be inundated more often due to extreme weather. We are continuing to build new homes in high-risk areas, we are allowing paving over of surfaces in urban areas which leads to surface water flooding, and we are not retrofitting homes to make them more resilient.
Rail and roads will be more likely buckle or melt in hot weather while power infrastructure will be damaged by extreme events. We are not retrofitting our infrastructure to allow it to function under a changed climate. Coastal towns will be inundated by rising sea levels. We are not planning managed retreat from low-lying coastal towns and villages. We will be chronically short of water in many parts of the country. We are not managing demand by domestic users, farmers and industry.
Growing our own food may become more challenging. According to analysis commissioned a few years ago by Defra, much of the most productive farmland in the UK may become unsuitable for agriculture in the second half of this century. Finally, ecosystems and habitats and the services they provide will suffer because they are in poor condition now.
This sounds like a grim scenario for future generations but, unless the Government start serious action now, these are not unrealistic scenarios. Although the Times this morning warns us not to be too apocalyptic about future risks, it would be foolhardy to ignore them.
Does NAP3, the third national adaptation plan, give us a glimmer of hope? In her introduction, the Secretary of State says that NAP3 is the “step change” that the Climate Change Committee has called for, and, indeed, there are some positive features: the Government commit to establish a new climate and resilience board of senior officials to work across government; the NAP3 attempts to respond to all 61 climate risks and opportunities in the third Climate Change Risk Assessment; it announces £15 million more for more research from UKRI and Defra. Clearly, we need to know more—we have to have a strong evidence base—but we must not be seduced into paralysis by analysis.
The NAP3 says that the Department for Transport will publish an adaptation strategy and the Department for Business and Trade will publish a new strategy on supply chains, including the impacts of climate change. And NAP3 says that various nature recovery initiatives will take into account the impact and need to adapt to the consequences of climate change. So these are positive aspects of the latest national adaptation plan.
However, the Climate Change Committee says in its assessment that while NAP3 is better than its predecessors, it still falls well short of a plan to ensure that the country is properly prepared for the impacts of climate change. When I started reading it, I was delighted to see on pages 9 to 11 a summary of the actions that the Government will take to prepare us for the future impacts of climate change.
As noble Lords will know, actions come in three categories: inputs, outputs and outcomes. In the end, it is outcomes that count. Unfortunately, none of the actions listed on those pages of the third national adaptation plan are outcome actions, nor is it explained how the impact of the actions listed will be measured or over what timescale. In short, NAP3 will not tell us whether or not the Government are effectively adapting this country to climate change. The words used to describe those actions, such as “take into account”, “update”, “work with”, “survey” and “explore” do not give much confidence that the actions are directly linked to outcomes. Furthermore, although the NAP appears to announce new initiatives, at least some of those are simply reheated existing policies and funding commitments, such as the £5.2 billion for flood and coastal defences, the tripling of ODA adaptation funding, and the adverse health and weather plan.
My final point about the third national adaptation plan is that the so-called adaptation reporting power remains voluntary. The power requires organisations that have key functions, such as local authorities and providers of infrastructure and healthcare, to report on their adaptation plans. Surely it should be mandatory that they have to report, not simply voluntary if they care to do so. In short, my reading of NAP3 is summarised as “could do better”.
Before I finish my introduction to this debate, I address my comments to those noble Lords who are sceptical about the need to take any action to adapt to climate change. On July 11, at col. 1636 of Hansard, a Member of your Lordships’ House claimed that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II says in its sixth assessment report that
“there is not expected to be, nor is there any sign so far of, any increase in droughts, floods, landslides or fires”.—[Official Report, 11/7/23; col. 1636.]
As that statement is in Hansard, I wish to correct it. Here is what IPCC Working Group II says in its summary for policymakers:
“Human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability … Global warming, reaching 1.5°C in the near-term, would cause unavoidable increases in multiple climate hazards and present multiple risks to ecosystems and humans”.
In the working group’s category of how confident it is, it has very high confidence in that statement.
There are also those who critique the notion of adaptation to climate change because of the costs. They ask whether it is worth spending money now to prepare for an uncertain future. It is worth pointing out that the third climate change risk assessment includes an analysis of the benefit-to-cost ratio of adaptation for different risks. As with any such analysis, there are inherent uncertainties, and the CCRA presents a range of values; it does not anchor on a single value. However, the modal value for many cases is that investing now has a benefit-to-cost ratio of between two and 10—in other words, every pound invested today could yield benefits of between £2 and £10 in future. So although some people argue that it is not worth spending the money now, I think the evidence is against them.
I look forward to the contributions of noble Lords to this debate. I close with some questions for the Minister. First, the national adaptation plan announces a climate and resilience board. Who will be on it, what are its terms of reference, to whom will it report, how often will it meet and will its minutes be made public? Secondly, as I have explained, a problem with the latest national adaptation plan is that it does not set out specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound outcome actions so that it would be possible to measure progress in adaptation. Could the Minister tell us whether the Government have any intention of setting out such specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound outcome actions? If so, by when? Thirdly, could the Minister confirm that the Government do not intend to roll back on their green agenda, including climate adaptation, in spite of reports to that effect in the press in the past few days? I beg to move.
Let us look at one example at the micro level, also mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs: the calls for Britain to adapt to the health consequences of rising temperatures. We should dig in deeper and ask: what are the consequences of hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters? At the moment, seven times as many people die from cold as from heat in Britain. Rising temperatures are likely to be beneficial. No less than the Government Actuary’s Department wrote in April this year that
“it is the low winter temperatures that have a greater effect on the number of deaths … since the start of the millennium … A decline in deaths from cold temperature periods has more than offset any increase in the number of deaths associated with warmer temperature over the same period”.
I am not sceptical about adaptation; I am sceptical about mitigation. I suggest that the rational thing to do is move away from the current high-cost mitigation efforts, which involve massive investment in unproductive renewables, huge changes in lifestyles and the crushing of economic growth, and pursue mitigation in a different way. We should invest in effective energy production—such as nuclear, gas and other technologies as they emerge. Meanwhile, we should spend the manageable sums that we need to on adaptation so we can adjust to the perfectly manageable consequences of slowly rising temperatures as they emerge.
For some countries, adaptation is an existential requirement. Low-lying islands such as the Maldives and some Caribbean and Pacific nations will disappear unless we adapt as well as mitigate. Yet the already inadequate Glasgow commitments made by richer nations have failed to materialise. Here in Britain, we need a focus on flood defence. We need to be prepared to designate which land we will have to abandon, yet we are still building on floodplains. For this city of London, we need to start assessing the cost and the need for a second Thames barrier. We need to be building net-zero homes, yet the Government have abandoned those regulations.
Adaptations mean not only major infrastructure expenditure and commitment but societal change in our behaviour. The Environment and Climate Change Committee of your Lordships’ House, on which I sit, produced a report a few months ago in which we looked at changes in relation to food, energy and transport. I will not go over those, but they are all needed. At the moment, we are so far off the net-zero trajectory that we have little chance of limiting climate change. We need early focus on adaptation. The recent adaptation report from the sub-committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, who is not in her place, indicates that early adaptation investment could, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said, give 10 times as much benefit later on and avoid additional expenditure. And yet we have the present pressure on today’s leaders and commitments by the major parties to back off from their policies.
Our hotter summers need cooler homes, the energy for which, for obvious reasons, will come most efficiently and cheaply from solar PV. I suggest to the Minister that a sensible immediate policy change would be to lift the moratorium on solar PV. He should lend his support to the amendment to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill for rooftop solar on every new domestic and commercial building—an amendment to which I have added my name. The IEA and the IPCC are clear: we have the means to supply all our energy needs without new fossil fuels and therefore without adding to the already deadly accumulation of greenhouse gases.
If an inventory of historic emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution is apportioned by nation, it is clear that the bulk of the responsibility for the clean-up lies with the richer nations of the world, not with those which have contributed the least to the problem. The loss of environmental benefits and the degradation of natural capital will be global and affect us all. Enlightened self-interest, if nothing else, should dictate that we take urgent adaptation measures seriously, both here at home and around the rest of our planet.
There is also a very important opportunity for us to start adapting the built environment of our hospitals. His Majesty’s Government are rightly committed to a major hospital-building programme. That provides the opportunity to start designing our hospitals so that they can provide services to our fellow citizens in the future that may be much more like services associated with the management of acute infectious diseases. That includes the management of patients who have underlying chronic conditions; they may see acute exasperations, such as exasperated respiratory illnesses, in periods of a substantial climate change and climate variation.
I will ask the Minister two questions. First, are His Majesty’s Government content that the Health Protection Agency is now properly mobilised and constructed in such a way to be able to provide the kind of surveillance and acute interventions that are required to protect us? Secondly, is the Minister content that the hospital-building programme is building in such a way as to deal with the potential consequences of climate change?
The huge incoming changes in the structure of farming subsidies, with the phasing out of the basic payment scheme and the phasing in of the environmental land management schemes, are valuable and worthy in their intent. But difficulties in accessing new funding are in danger of pushing many small farmers over the edge, and the new schemes are insufficiently integrated with climate goals and indicators, on both mitigation and adaptation. Investment is needed here to help farmers and land managers choose the optimal use for each plot of land, considering water management, crop productivity, carbon storage and non-farm uses, alongside the Government’s existing and welcome commitment to greater biodiversity.
Water infrastructure is equally in need of fresh investment, not simply in reservoirs and pipe renewals but in nature-based solutions. Very little UK agriculture is currently irrigated, but that is likely to change as water supplies become increasingly inconsistent, with severe implications for our already stretched reservoir capacity. Meanwhile, the spectre of synchronised crop failures across a whole family of nations is real, making the case for lessening our dependence on imports even stronger.
I declare an interest in crop improvement work, in which my son-in-law Peter is involved as a foundation fellow at the Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development. Peter would be the first to acknowledge that a cohesive approach to land use is by far the most important factor in the food security equation, whatever the weather.
We must make sure that we are making the changes that are necessary, and it will be cheaper to do it now than pay the costs and have to do it later. That is the difference. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that it is not just 2:10; it is the cost in between times that not having spent lays on our shoulders. We in the Climate Change Committee—I declare my interest as its former chairman—gave the Government a list of things that could be done, and needed to be done. We expected not only that the Government should accept them but that they should be able to measure whether they had done them and that the outcomes would be available for people to know. That has not happened. I say to my noble friend that unless you measure it—I come back to being a businessman—you do not do it.
If this were presented to me as the company report on how we were to deal with the problems of climate change, I would have to say that the person who presented it should be sacked. That is how I feel about this report.