Barry Gardiner (Labour)

There is a rumour that the Deputy Prime Minister let slip to the Liaison Committee last week his support for having a 2030 decarbonisation target in the Energy Bill. Will he therefore be so kind as to encourage his party to support the cross-party amendments tabled by the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo) and myself to ensure that precisely what he wants is put in place as quickly as possible?

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The Deputy Prime Minister

I have never made a secret of that being my first preference and neither has the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. However, others took the contrary view that there should be no decarbonisation target whatever. Very openly, we have compromised such that we will set the decarbonisation target in 2016—the first year of the fifth carbon budget. In the meantime, we will take powers in legislation to set that decarbonisation target. That is the agreement that we have reached in government, we have been open about how we arrived at that position, and that is the position that we will stick to.

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