Lord Whitehead (Lab)

My Lords, first, let me thank noble Lords for their valuable—that is what it says here in my brief—contributions to this debate. I cannot say that I endorse that entirely. I also cannot quite get my mind around the parallel universe that some noble Lords seem to have been inhabiting while making their points this evening. On that parallel universe, I draw noble Lords’ attention to a very significant speech that was made today just a few hundred yards from this building. It was given by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who, as part of London Climate Action Week, made an impassioned speech on climate change, including what we need to do about it, how quickly we need to do something about it, and what we need to do on electrification and low-carbon economies in particular. I hope that noble Lords will go away and look up that speech, because among other things it completely gives the lie to the idea that no one else in the world is terribly interested in this climate change business, that no one else is doing anything about it, that the activities we are undertaking on climate change are just blowing in the wind, and that we are giving away our industries to other people who will take advantage of them. A number of the industries that they are talking about are sunset industries that are being replaced by low-carbon industries which, if we are not careful, the rest of the world will run away with. They would then overtake the advantages that we have at the moment in green industry, which we are doing very well in. The green economy has grown three times as fast as the general economy in the last few years. The people who live in this fantasy parallel world appear to be saying that none of that counts. We are making tremendous changes to how energy is distributed in the low-carbon economy. This is a good thing for climate change purposes and will bring people’s bills down in the long term. The energy we will be using will inevitably be cheaper, more affordable, less volatile and more stable than the energy we are using now. It will produce a very large number of jobs: £100 billion in green investment has come into this country over the last two or three years. However, none of this appears to have any effect whatever on the parallel facts that are put forward. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, appeared to be saying that the rest of the world was moving away from action on climate. I was at an international meeting this morning where people from around the world were standing up and saying what they were doing about this, how committed they are to a low-carbon future and how important it is for their own countries and for the world that we continue down this path. This climate budget has to be set in the context of the real world of facts and information about where our world is going and what we need to do to make sure that it does not continue in the direction that it appears to be going at the moment, rather than in the context of quite a lot of what we have heard this evening about why all of this is a waste of time. I am afraid that I must single out the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, in this respect. One really cannot make a serious case that, because we cannot completely know the future, we should do nothing whatever about it and just hope that the market somehow sorts it out. We have got to take action. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, mentioned, we took action with the Climate Change Act, which was carried by everybody in the Commons except five people. I can name them.