Net-Zero Carbon Emissions

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hayman (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a co-chair of Peers for the Planet and echo the words of previous speakers in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on his compelling introductory speech, on the work that he did for many years on the EU Environment Sub-Committee and on his impeccable timing in allowing us to debate this subject in the week of the Government’s commitment to the Climate Change Committee’s sixth carbon budget targets.

I suspect that the themes running through this debate will be echoed by many speakers. I, too, want to focus on the transition from rhetoric to reality. There is that beautiful phrase from Mario Cuomo:

“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”


The Government so far have been very good about the poetry of commitment on climate, but the prose of delivery has not been so good. As others will, I want to focus today on how we achieve the emissions reductions needed to achieve the targets that we have adopted, and on how delivery is the challenge now.

While the scale of action needed at every level—national, regional, local government, industry, science and technology and individual behaviour change—is huge, it is important to remember that there are tremendous benefits as well as costs in taking the opportunities offered by setting sustainability as our guiding principle. As the Foreign Affairs Committee said this week in its report A Climate for Ambition: Diplomatic Preparations for COP 26:

“The recovery from covid-19 will require a Marshall Plan-scale commitment from many and the UK should ensure that this aligns with environmental ambitions, embedding a green outlook into a new economy. The FCDO should communicate to its partners that environmental agendas are not in competition but integral to health, development, and security policies.”


I want to argue that central to achieving our targets, as well as a whole range of specific initiatives and investments in the areas that we know are critical, will be a whole-systems approach to integrated climate considerations into policy-making in every aspect of national life. While success will not come from government action alone, government has a central role in leading, facilitating, stimulating and providing the regulatory and taxation frameworks for success, as well as investing and working, as others have said, constructively with local government and devolved Administrations.

I shall not focus today on policy areas where net zero needs to be embedded or the various sector strategies needed, particularly in relation to energy, buildings, planning, housing, transport, industry, skills and education. I am sure that other noble Lords will focus on those topics, along with the investment challenge, to ensure that there is the right balance between direct government funding and private investment and that the transition is just. Instead, I want to address the governance of policy.

The Council for Science and Technology, in its 2020 report Achieving Net Zero Carbon Emissions through a Whole Systems Approach, emphasised:

“Achieving net zero by 2050 is a system transformation challenge … Policy areas that have previously been managed separately or in isolation will need to be brought together. They should be developed as an interconnected programme of work, driven by data and analytics, with responsibilities, funding and accountability aligned behind a single goal”.


To put it simply: no more silos.

We need to adopt the standpoint articulated by the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who said this week that the US State Department would “weave” the climate crisis into the fabric of everything that it did. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and other speakers illustrated, we are not doing that weaving very well at the moment; we need radically to improve the machinery of government and the coherence of policy-making if we are to achieve an integrated approach.

Others have mentioned the Cabinet committee on climate change. We are told that it was established in October 2019, but there has been little indication of progress or activity, and there are few formalised mechanisms within the government machine to ensure joined-up, consistent and prioritised consideration for delivery of net zero targets. The Government’s 10-point plan promised a net zero task force, but when will it be set up, who will comprise the membership, how will it report to Parliament and the public, and will departments such as housing and transport, responsible for high volumes of emissions, be included in a way they are not on the current Cabinet sub-committee for strategy? The absence of such cross-cutting mechanisms and of a determinedly coherent approach at the highest level of government cascades down into inconsistent policy- and decision-making that is either contrary to or fails to take advantage of opportunities to achieve progress towards our net zero targets, so legislation is still introduced with no mention or understanding of the relevance of our domestic and international responsibility on climate, as seen recently in Bills on pensions and finance, when action had to be taken in your Lordships’ House to include provisions on climate.

Then there are decisions such as that on the Cumbria coal mine, road building programmes, airport expansion, air passenger duty, the freezing of fuel duty and bailouts without strings for high-carbon sectors, which run contrary to our commitment to net zero and undermine our position as a global climate leader. As others have said, cancellation of zero-carbon homes standards and the green homes grant has slowed down the decarbonisation of housing and has pushed the costs of retrofit on to home owners.

How can we achieve this systemic integrated approach? First and foremost, I would suggest a mindset and leadership at the highest level of government, and this is where the argument for there being a Cabinet Minister in charge comes. That would ensure that a climate lens is applied to all policies and legislation and that the elusive ideal of joined-up government is actually put into practice.

We need to look at some other specific approaches, some of which have already been adopted in other countries. One of the most important would be for all proposed legislation and policy initiatives coming to Cabinet to have a climate impact assessment to show whether or not they align with net zero. This is already being done in New Zealand and Sweden. We could place a statutory duty on departments and Ministers to further climate change goals. The new US climate Bill directs federal agencies to

“use all existing authorities to put the US on a path towards meeting this net-zero emissions target.”

Just as the Bank of England has been given a remit to take climate risk considerations into account, so could other regulators and public bodies. National planning policy statements should all be aligned with net zero, not be incoherent, as they are at the moment.

Given the critical role of local government, which others have stressed, we could follow the example of Ireland, which has set up a network of four local authority climate action regional offices to support co-ordination and learning and address mitigation and adaptation.

There is an argument for the Government to consider setting up a delivery body, along the lines of the Olympic Delivery Authority, to drive forward the huge systemic change needed. Given that transition will entail change for individual citizens, are the Government going to build on the very successful climate citizens’ assembly held by Parliament last year?

Before I conclude, I will deal with one question that is often raised: is there any value in the UK taking effective action to reduce domestic emissions, given that we are, as some would say, small fry compared with other nations in the league table of emitters? In the year when we are hosting both the G7 and COP 26, we have both enormous opportunities and enormous responsibilities to influence other countries, including those with greater emissions than our own, to take radical action to halt climate change and reverse bio- diversity loss. We will not have the credibility to lead in those fora unless we have ourselves walked the walk, not just talked the talk.

There is much talk of global Britain post Brexit. To achieve that ambition, what we do at home will directly influence levels of climate ambition across the world. In the words of the Foreign Affairs Committee report I quoted earlier:

“The UK has the chance to lead and set ambitious domestic climate policies, alongside credible plans to deliver them … It is essential that domestic policy decisions support rather than undermine diplomatic efforts. We recommend that the UK leads by example and sets ambitious domestic climate policies.”


We need to achieve those ambitious domestic policies. If we do so, and achieve the integrated and whole-system approach necessary to do so, we will not only have strengthened our economy, created sustainable jobs for the future, improved our nation’s health, and protected the future and our grandchildren, but genuinely led the world.