Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:46 pm on 14 July 2021.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 1:46, 14 July 2021

We absolutely are, Delyth. We're part of a global network of nations working on this and what we're looking to do is make sure that we fit nicely inside the global framework in an ambitious, but nevertheless achievable way. We don't want this to be a council of despair either. It's a very hard balance to strike. So, what we're doing is we're working with the global community. We'll get some learning from COP26 as well and that will enable us to swiftly put our own targets in place. As you know, as we've rehearsed on many occasions, I'm very keen on having the targets, but we have to be absolutely certain that they don't have unintended consequences where we overlook things that don't have specific targets associated with them and so on. So, we'll be wanting to work very carefully across the Senedd floor and with the sector to make sure that the targets are both stretching, but also realistic and have as few unintended consequences as we can manage. And we think that's best placed in that global environment. We sit in a plan, don't we? So, we have the global one, we have the UK one and we'll have the Wales one, and I'm very keen that Wales takes a global role in that, so that we show what small nations that are very dedicated to this can actually do.

So, in terms of the time frame, that will slightly depend on the legislative programme. We've rehearsed a number of times the problems we've got with capacity, but we're looking to put an environment protection Act in place as well; we're looking to see if there are other opportunities to add the legislation on targets and so on to a Bill that might already be programmed in, and if not, to work with the Llywydd and the Commission staff to see where we can find some space in the programme to fit it in. So, what we'll do is we'll make sure that the regime is in place without the statutory backing at first if we can't find the programme, but we will put it on a statutory basis as soon as we can. I'm trying not to overpromise the statutory thing, given that I know the problems, but the regime itself and the consensus that the Government should be acting to make sure that happens will definitely be there.