Carbon Budget Order 2026

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

My Lords, first, let me thank noble Lords for their valuable—that is what it says here in my brief—contributions to this debate. I cannot say that I endorse that entirely. I also cannot quite get my mind around the parallel universe that some noble Lords seem to have been inhabiting while making their points this evening.

On that parallel universe, I draw noble Lords’ attention to a very significant speech that was made today just a few hundred yards from this building. It was given by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who, as part of London Climate Action Week, made an impassioned speech on climate change, including what we need to do about it, how quickly we need to do something about it, and what we need to do on electrification and low-carbon economies in particular.

I hope that noble Lords will go away and look up that speech, because among other things it completely gives the lie to the idea that no one else in the world is terribly interested in this climate change business, that no one else is doing anything about it, that the activities we are undertaking on climate change are just blowing in the wind, and that we are giving away our industries to other people who will take advantage of them. A number of the industries that they are talking about are sunset industries that are being replaced by low-carbon industries which, if we are not careful, the rest of the world will run away with. They would then overtake the advantages that we have at the moment in green industry, which we are doing very well in. The green economy has grown three times as fast as the general economy in the last few years.

The people who live in this fantasy parallel world appear to be saying that none of that counts. We are making tremendous changes to how energy is distributed in the low-carbon economy. This is a good thing for climate change purposes and will bring people’s bills down in the long term. The energy we will be using will inevitably be cheaper, more affordable, less volatile and more stable than the energy we are using now. It will produce a very large number of jobs: £100 billion in green investment has come into this country over the last two or three years.

However, none of this appears to have any effect whatever on the parallel facts that are put forward. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, appeared to be saying that the rest of the world was moving away from action on climate. I was at an international meeting this morning where people from around the world were standing up and saying what they were doing about this, how committed they are to a low-carbon future and how important it is for their own countries and for the world that we continue down this path.

This climate budget has to be set in the context of the real world of facts and information about where our world is going and what we need to do to make sure that it does not continue in the direction that it appears to be going at the moment, rather than in the context of quite a lot of what we have heard this evening about why all of this is a waste of time. I am afraid that I must single out the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, in this respect. One really cannot make a serious case that, because we cannot completely know the future, we should do nothing whatever about it and just hope that the market somehow sorts it out. We have got to take action.

As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, mentioned, we took action with the Climate Change Act, which was carried by everybody in the Commons except five people. I can name them.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

Me.

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, is with us this evening. At least I can say that the noble Lord is consistent. He did not sign it in the first place and I do not think he would sign it now if he had the opportunity.

That Climate Change Act, which requires us legally to carry out these carbon budget examinations, set up the Climate Change Committee to advise us on the science behind the proceedings and tell us what we need to be doing, not just now but in the future, so that we have time to make policy for what we will be doing to match what is required in those carbon budgets. We have that legal obligation, because we passed the Climate Change Act together in that year.

It has stood us in very good stead. It has directed what this country tries to do, without telling us what we do in detailed policy. Some of the discussions this evening have set up what the Government are apparently going to do and then said, “We don’t like it very much”. No, the Government are not going to go around shooting cows and rounding up livestock for slaughter. The Government will be doing what it is doing now and investing £5 billion over two years in farming. This is perhaps the largest investment in sustainable food production and nature recovery in this country’s history.

Alongside that, the Government are actively exploring ways to reduce livestock-related greenhouse gas emissions, including through scientific research on mitigation strategies and management, feed, such as the increasing adoption of methane-suppressing food products, and breeding. There are many alternative ways of making sure that agriculture and land use plays its part in climate change emission reductions without the straw man that some of the opponents of climate change action seem to have set up in this Chamber—that the Government are somehow going to chase livestock out of the country in order to meet climate change restrictions. To produce alternative theories, I am afraid you need alternative facts.

The impact assessment has, among other things, a fairly exact examination of the costs of doing nothing, as opposed to the costs of doing something. This has been a long-standing theme. The University of Cambridge, for example, estimates that climate damage will reduce global GDP by up to 24% under a high emissions scenario by 2100. There are pages of other information about the costs of doing nothing, as opposed to the cost of doing something, and I always advise noble Lords to go to impact assessments if they want to know the truth about what is happening on any piece of legislation.

My noble friend Lord Hunt underlined that the regret amendments that we have in front of us are big on things that are not liked very much and tiny to insignificant on what, if anything, to do about it. Indeed, one has a responsibility, if one does not like what is being done now, to say what should be done alternatively. Alternatively, if one does not like, say, the climate change legislation, stand up and say that, and say what else you will do instead, or, as some Members have said, just deny that the whole thing is an issue and have an alternative universe of facts to try to underpin that.

I am conscious that I will have to write to a number of noble Lords on specific issues, but I thought it necessary to put what we are doing tonight in the right context. What we are doing is making sure that our futures are secure in this world.