Net-Zero Carbon Emissions

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I start with some congratulations. I first congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on picking out this debate and on his masterly coverage of the issues in his opening statement. This is a vital point; we need to make sure that government not only is not prone to complacency—as has been the case hitherto—but is getting itself into a position where it is capable of delivering what it promises and its stated intentions. I also briefly congratulate the Government, who yesterday produced on paper a pretty coherent response to the Climate Change Committee’s latest carbon budget, increasing the ambition of the timescale for delivery of our pathway to net zero.

That was positive. It was also positive that, for the first time, they included figures for the UK’s contribution to the cost of shipping and aviation, which the British economy imposes on international transportation. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, asked, however, where are the means of delivery? We have already failed—or are likely to fail—to meet the previous CCC carbon budget, and there is no reason to think that the Government are in better shape to deliver on the subsequent stages. The work of the Climate Change Committee has been vital. It has spelled out across the board what we need to do nationally, locally and internationally. Everybody—apart from a few climate change deniers, whom we still have in this House—has agreed that this is a good and clear road map. In theory, so it is, but it is the practice to which the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has drawn to our attention.

I draw the same conclusion as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. We need in charge of this process a senior Minister at least equivalent in status to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The appointment of Alok Sharma, capable man though he is, is not what I mean. I mean someone who has command over other departments, whose name resounds around Whitehall, and who can give a lead to other parts of the public and private sector.

We also need to engage all departments in a high-level Cabinet committee, probably led by that same Minister, if not the Prime Minister himself. In different circumstances, I might have suggested the Prime Minister, but I am not entirely sure that, in the present circumstances, that would be wise. We need somebody specifically focused on this task. Again, as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, says, the departments largely in charge of delivery at the moment are not particularly highly rated within Whitehall or, indeed, in the country as a whole. Moreover, their climate change commitments are only part of their responsibilities, so BEIS’s responsibility for climate change is often swamped by its industrial and energy responsibilities. Even Defra, which is still in charge of mitigation and various other aspects of climate change, is swamped by rural and agricultural requirements. They are not departments that can deliver. We need a new department for climate change.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. There is a Division in the Chamber, so we shall adjourn for five minutes.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Grand Committee will now resume and I invite the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, to continue his speech.

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

I apologise for the interruption; I have slightly lost my place. My original intention in looking at this was to go through all 10 points of the Prime Minister’s commitment to creating a green industrial society and strategy. That was probably too much and, in any case, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has already covered a few of them.

However, under each point, it is clear that is not just central government and a particular department that is responsible for delivery, but a whole range of departments; that was pretty clear from what the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said about transport, buildings and so forth. Even the things that appear to be the purview of one department are affected by the position of other departments. Take the first: quadrupling offshore wind power. This involves BEIS, obviously, as the sponsoring department in energy policy, but we are proposing quadrupling wind power, which means that we will have to bring more of that power ashore. It means that the current situation, where individual turbines in arrays have their own point of contact to the shoreline, will increase a hundredfold if we allow every single instance of a turbine in an array to have its own point of contact. That is ridiculous.

We need to ensure that there is a network at sea before we bring it on land so that we reduce those hundreds of points to a few score. That requires planning permission from the local authority; environmental controls from the Environment Agency; and Defra and the marine authorities to look at the effects on marine life and fisheries. And all that needs to be brought together to deliver what seems to be a simple quadrupling of what has been a very successful commitment to offshore wind.

The same will apply in other areas, even in nuclear power, which seems very much a central, single government interest. That will also require huge commitments on the environmental, planning and construction side. It will require an integration of the delivery of new nuclear power with other aspects of the delivery of greener energy and heating, such as the creation of hydrogen and, indeed, carbon capture and storage.

I have decided not to go through all 10 points so I will not do so. However, in addition to the changes in central government that the noble Lord referred to, as have I, we will need local government to become more coherent, we need relations between the central Administration and the devolved Administrations to work more effectively on this, and we will need to ensure that there is clarity in reporting to Parliament.

That is my last point. I was a member of the Joint Committee of the House of Commons which preceded the Climate Change Act 2008. I now seem to have gone full circle: as of last week, I have become a member of the Lords new Committee on Environment and Climate Change, and I am very grateful to your Lordships for putting me there. However, some things have not improved, and cohesion in government is one of them. If that is not achieved by government itself, perhaps parliamentary pressure through our committees and the Commons committees will ensure that the fine words and the very clear policy direction is delivered by an interlocking and clear commitment from government. The clear strategy, some of which was announced yesterday, the fine words, the individual commitments, and the fact that we have most of business and much of the public on side, will not deliver of itself. It would be a serious problem if we were to screw all this up due to institutional inflexibility and a lack of interlocking government.

I support this Motion and I hope the Government take serious notice of what has been said.

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[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. Given that I will focus on education throughout much of my speech, I remind the Committee of my education interests in the register, particularly relating to my work with Purpose on climate education.

I also welcome yesterday’s government announcement of putting into law the target to cut emissions by 78% by 2035, as recommended by the Climate Change Committee. This morning I read with interest the news of the Mark Carney-led initiative to bring together 160 firms from the global finance sector—including Barclays, HSBC and Axa—with over $70 trillion in assets to meet new targets to cut the carbon content of those assets by 2030. It occurred to me: if the finance sector can come up with a plan, what is the plan for the public sector?

Clearly, we need leadership from central government and, as others have said, this year is a great opportunity. Tomorrow is Biden’s summit; the biodiversity COP is next month in China; the G7 is in Cornwall in June; there is the G20 meeting in Italy; and COP 26 is in November in Glasgow. This is the time to set an aggressive, ambitious course with such a focus on climate change to drive national momentum and public opinion.

The cynic in me, as with others, warns that this is a Government who love an announcement and a Prime Minister who craves the attention and will glory in the UK’s leadership role this year. But do they have a delivery plan to make this happen? Will the Chancellor change the Treasury’s long-standing hostility to green spending and fund a road map to carbon zero? Incidentally, rather than a separate Cabinet Minister for climate change, I would prefer to make the Chancellor accountable for the delivery of climate change plans, as part of a shift of emphasis in the Treasury from money to well-being.

Fundamental to that is investment in local government-led projects to enable place-based change. This is not just about the obvious local authority functions of housing, transport or waste. These are crucial, but we also need to see beyond a transactional approach of investment in X technology to achieve Y reduction in carbon emissions. That will not always deal with the ingrained political problem of there being parts of the population who are not ready for the change.

The importance of a place-based approach is that success is first and foremost about behaviour change in the whole population. We have seen how hard that is through the pandemic. Despite the best efforts of “hands, space, face” as a slogan, and billions in spending, plenty are still struggling to shift their behaviour to make our communities safe from the virus. How then will we get the whole population to change the food we eat, how we move around, how we dress and how we fuel our lives so that they are sustainable and affordable?

I believe that one of the biggest mistakes in the Government’s thinking in their handling of the virus is that they have not sufficiently engaged local government as an ally. Localities are different and need different solutions to create behaviour change. A national approach will always struggle to account for the rich diversity of our nation. Our impoverished councils urgently need more resources to invest in climate change mitigation projects that will effect the behaviour change we need.

The place I would start is in schools and colleges. Almost half of all households in this country contain school-age children. Children and young people are already engaged with this issue. We saw that with the Friday school strikes. According to the OECD, 78% of students in its member countries agree that the global environment is important to them and want to do something about it. The opportunity is to stand alongside those children and young people to shift our behaviour at a household and community level. The majority of schools in this country are still local authority schools, either directly or in partnership with faith groups. There is an urgent need to enable and empower local authorities to take a leadership role on this.

I commend to your Lordships the work of the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. It recently published a powerful analysis by Christina Kwauk and Rebecca Winthrop, which says:

“Recent research shows that if only 16 percent of high school students in high- and middle-income countries were to receive climate change education, we could see a nearly 19 gigaton reduction of carbon dioxide by 2050. When education helps students develop a strong personal connection to climate solutions, as well as a sense of personal agency and empowerment, it can have consequential impact on students’ daily behaviors and decisionmaking that reduces their overall lifetime carbon footprint. Imagine if 100 percent of students in the world received such an education. New evidence also shows that the combination of women’s empowerment and education that includes everyone—especially the 132 million out-of-school girls across the developing world—could result in an 85 gigaton reduction of carbon dioxide by 2050. By these estimates, leveraging the power of education is potentially more powerful than solely increasing investments in onshore wind turbines … or concentrated solar power”.


It goes on to say:

“Emerging research suggests the ‘sweet spot’ for climate action is at the scale of 10,000-100,000 people. This is not only because the collective ability to make meaningful action is rooted in local relevance, but also because we reach a certain degree of cost-benefit optimization when it comes to the global impact of our local actions. If we apply this to the education system, this is equivalent to focusing efforts at the school district level—or the equivalent school administrative cluster, depending on the population size of cities and counties. School districts are the perfect network of institutions that exist in every country in the world that has enough community connection potential to effectively scale green civic learning. Focusing efforts at the local level enables educational interventions to be community-driven, which is aligned to what we know about effective climate action and effective climate change education: that is, it needs to be locally-relevant, tied to local environmental justice issues, tied to local community challenges with climate change, and it needs to be tied to action and ownership at community level.”


Here I commend the work of Ashden’s Let’s Go Zero campaign, which a sixth of county councils are supporting, along with the Anglican Church. So far it has got more than 200 schools to pledge to be carbon zero by 2030. The smart thing about this campaign is not just the carbon impact but the educational one. It aims to get school and college leaders to stand alongside their students and pupils in making this pledge one institution at a time.

It is critical for the behaviour change for this to be owned by the school itself and to have the work to move to zero led by young people. That way, they learn about the consumption of energy and water on the site, the carbon impacts of the food they consume in school, the carbon capture of what they can grow on the estate, and the importance of the choices they make when they travel to and from the school or college. They can then apply that knowledge with the skills they need and, most importantly, develop the carbon-zero mindset we need in the whole population if we are serious about the 2050 net-zero target, let alone the new 2035 one.

This is because, of course, we want schools to reflect the future we want for our communities. That has to be a carbon-zero future. By starting with schools and colleges, we are nurturing the skills and mindsets needed in the labour force as we shift to the sustainable future we all want. Young people need a strong knowledge base in the causes of a warming climate, but also a strong set of skills that will allow them to apply their knowledge in the real world, including problem-solving, critical thinking, teamwork, coping with uncertainty, empathy and negotiation. Indeed, these very transferable skills are needed equally to thrive in the world of work and to be constructive citizens. There is such a win-win to be had here.

In this country, 77% of adults support teaching about climate change in schools and 69% of teachers agree that there should be more teaching on this subject than what is focused on in the non-compulsory subject of geography. My ask, therefore, is for central government to prioritise climate education in schools. Would the Minister like to join me in visiting a school to meet its school council, and to lobby it to make the Let’s Go Zero pledge? The Minister should be inspired by Italy, where every school-age child, by law, must have an hour each week of sustainable citizenship education. Here, we should mandate time, resources and training for teachers in this area, and then work closely with local authorities on the delivery of all our schools becoming carbon zero by 2030.

This is our chance to move on from children and climate strikes to children leading climate action. We can use our leadership position at COP to get others to do the same and, in doing so, drive the behaviour shift across the population that the world needs.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, the next two speakers have withdrawn from the debate, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale.

[Lord Redesdale (LD)]

My Lords, I must first declare my interests on the register as a director of SECR Reporting Ltd and Climate Change Professionals, and as a board member of the Energy Managers Association. As part of the work I undertake I advise companies and local authorities on net-zero targets, the policies they would need to put in place to achieve that, and the strategies they would have to undertake. Unfortunately, it is very clear from this work that there is a massive difference between aspiration and reality. A lot of greenwash is going on as well. One local authority I spoke to came up with a 2038 target. I asked how it came up with that. It said, “Well, the authority next door made a 2040 target, so we thought we’d go with 2038.” On digging into the details, it had no idea how it was going to achieve that. As the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, set out, a large number of local authorities have made this pledge, but from the work that I have done very few know how they will achieve it.

I thank my noble friend Lord Teverson for bringing this debate forward. It is usually at this point that I go into a great deal of detail on what the Government are getting wrong. However, I have a solution that the Minister could take on board. He might be interested in it because—and I never thought I would say this—it would be based on the Conservative Government’s own policy and would be Brexit-friendly, but I will go into that a bit later. It could have a major effect on how companies understand their carbon targets.

I know from working with companies that there is a problem, because the net zero carbon targets are quite complicated. They are based on reducing emissions in scope 1, scope 2 and scope 3, based on the GHG protocol. I will run through them.

A lot of companies understand their scope 1 emissions to a degree—obviously, that is their electricity use—and if you have half-hourly data, that can be useful. However, I have been utterly amazed at how even large companies do not have a handle on how much energy they use. Gas is fairly simple, as it is based on therms. Transport fuel, however, is not simple to work out; most of the energy managers I work with have never had to deal with transport before. I was talking to a company—a call centre—which had 140 spaces in its car park and which was looking at the energy used in the building. I said, “The energy used in the building is actually a fraction of what is being used in your transport requirement to get everybody into the office at any time.” Of course, understanding how you calculate transport fuel is difficult, because you could do it on mileage, litres or cost of fuel, and a number of calculations need to take place. Many organisations have left transport out.

Scope 2 emissions are those that you have bought on behalf of another company or organisation, and some companies are getting that under way, especially with grey fleet. I have been amazed by how local authorities do not understand the emissions from grey fleet; that is, cars that are used as company cars. Of course, that is a very large emission factor that often does not get added to the emissions of the company itself.

On scope 3, which is the supply chain, very few apart from the largest companies have an understanding of the emissions from their supply chain, and of course that supply chain could dwarf any emissions they have taken out. When you work with companies it is often interesting to realise that we really do not understand our scope 3 emissions. One of the areas that is of particular interest is IT. I was talking to a company which was marketing and which had worked out how much electricity it was using on its computers, but it then proudly told me that it had sent 1 million emails that month, which of course has a massive effect on servers around the world. Gaming is horrendous for that, as is the mining of Bitcoin. However, many companies just do not understand the cost of computing, which is a real issue because it is very difficult to get that information. Amazon will give it to you, while Microsoft will not, so companies have a difficulty in understanding their emissions.

Once you have understood the emissions, that is not the problem; the problem is then building policies around them and understanding what those policies should be. A lot of companies and local authorities have made blank commitments to go to net zero by 2030, 2040 or 2050, but that policy is not linked to any deliverable outcomes. Obviously, the next step is to develop a strategy for going forward from that. We also talk to companies about responsibility: who in the company is responsible for delivering those directives? This seems to be a problem not only for companies and local authorities but for government. I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that perhaps we should have a Minister in charge of climate change, but we had that and then DECC was taken out, which was short-sighted. Perhaps we should look at reinstating a department on that basis.

Once you have a policy strategy and somebody responsible, companies need to understand that getting to net zero will have costs, so they will have to look at a CapEx solution. A lot of companies are just not prepared to spend money, even though they realise that in the longer term this could save them in energy savings. They also need to look at OpEx. Companies need to start understanding that what they are responsible for in managing their organisations has often been farmed out to third parties, especially in facilities management areas. Therefore, you might be running buildings, the contracts for which are based on a like- for-like replacement rather than replacing old equipment for more energy-efficient equipment.

We also look at transport, where there is of course the Government’s target to move to electrification. This is a major area of greenwash in a way, because there is, I think, a lack of understanding of how significant this will be for our electrical infrastructure. I talked to one company that had 100 car parking spaces and which said, “We’re going to electrify our fleet and we’re putting in three charging points.” I said, “That means you could probably charge nine cars during the working day—and you have 100 cars out there.” They then said that they would put in a lot of charging points. But, of course, if you put in more charging points you need a bigger transformer, and you need more electrical supply. At a lecture recently, I was interested to learn that those fast-charging points on motorways have an energy use equivalent to 250 houses. We realised that when we put them in, we were talking about a small village’s energy supply just for that.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight, talked about behaviour change. One area where we have been trying to work with companies is in getting people to realise that this is not just a policy. If we are to hit net zero, everybody in the company has to understand how they have to change their energy usage.

I have set out these small problems—slight mountains to climb—but I did say that I would suggest a solution to the Minister that could be helpful, which is to change the SECR reporting regime. In 2019, the Government brought forward a new GHG reporting regime: streamlined energy and carbon reporting, or SECR—it does not really roll off the tongue. It basically means that large companies—large as defined under the Companies Act—must report all their energy data, show which metric they have used and do an intensity metric. They also then have to list all their principal energy-efficiency measures and whether any are not undertaken. Each company has to do this by law and then report it to Companies House, with the information made available in its company report.

A very simple change that could be done very quickly through a statutory instrument—I know that PwC is doing some work for BEIS at the moment looking at whether this could be brought forward—would be to make it an obligation on companies to put their net zero plan into their company reports. It could be done in a way that was not very expensive. To make it Brexit-friendly, ESOS—the energy savings opportunity scheme—which was part of the European directive, could be scrapped, which would create a saving to companies. Some of the information that was needed for ESOS could then be incorporated into SECR, which is a second obligation on companies.

If companies were required to put their net zero plans into their company reports, it would allow stakeholders to understand where they are going forward. One area that we found most interesting is that companies are finding that their stakeholders are not just their shareholders any more but their employees, their customers and, interestingly, their banks, finance companies and insurers, which look very carefully at sustainability and climate change criteria when they are looking at investment opportunities.

Would the Minister be open to talking to his officials about whether SECR could be changed to include the net zero target and looking at whether we could introduce a statutory instrument to achieve this? If a statutory instrument were brought forward, it would mean that companies—before COP 26—would start having to set out their net zero plans. The cost would not be high, but it would mean that Britain would be a world leader in moving forward on how companies can adapt to climate change.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, is not on the call, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Stunell.