Net-zero Emissions Target: Affordability

Lord Bishop of Southwark Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Southwark]

My Lords, this is a timely debate. I am very glad to be able to speak in it. I am reminded that the preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes says:

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven”,


including—I dare to mention in your Lordships’ House—a time to speak and a time to keep silence.

For the Church, increased costs have a material effect on what we can do, but I am as reluctant as anyone else to tilt at windmills or turbines. Not only the scientific consensus about human activity and climate but the dramatic changes of one’s lifetime—expanding deserts, retreating glaciers, rising sea temperature, extreme weather events—lead me to believe that this is a situation where the option is not “when”, or even “what”, but “how”. As with other great crises, we must shoulder the burden, and it is a challenge to our political leadership to share this task. In the Church of England, we have an exceptionally challenging target set by General Synod of achieving net zero by 2030. The national Church has ring-fenced £190 million to support its churches and clergy housing towards this goal.

In the diocese of Southwark where I serve, and the borough of Southwark, our share of national Church funding has seen 18 of our churches embarking on co-funded projects that will directly reduce our CO₂ emissions. Further, 42 of our highest-emitting churches across the diocese have been offered a free energy audit and a starter grant from the Church of England to begin to take action to reduce emissions. We have, in addition, selected two churches—St Bartholomew’s in Horley and St Paul’s in Herne Hill—as demonstrator churches to provide an evidence base to demonstrate that rapid transition is possible.

That said, the need and the investment bring tangible benefits, as we have heard from other noble Lords. Churches and church schools around the country report significant savings in their energy bills as a result. In a wider context, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit has reported that the UK’s net-zero sector grew by over 10% between 2023 and 2024, and generates—no pun intended—£83.1 billion in gross value added. The growth in employment in the sector is four times that of the economy as a whole. The lifetime cost of electricity generation for new solar panels, as of 2021, is 11% lower than the cheapest form of new fossil fuel generator, and onshore wind is 39% cheaper.

To continue along this path will mitigate the otherwise fearful future ahead of us. The Office for Budget Responsibility last year calculated that severe weather could cost the UK economy 8% in GDP by 2050. The impact on poorer regions of the world, some of whose Anglican dioceses are linked to my own, will be dramatically greater and will cause a consequent upheaval and movement of populations. That will have major impacts on countries such as ours.

Yet if we pursue net zero by 2050 with the spirit, ingenuity and imagination at our command, and cherish the creation given us, we may yet begin to restore some of the damage our species has done. John Keats wrote:

“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,


Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing”.

Little did he realise that his poetry heralded the perils we face if we abandon our vigilance. The challenges of net zero are hard, but they are not unaffordable. The price of hesitation, though, will be irreversible. The time is now.