Climate Change Committee Progress Report 2021

Alan Whitehead Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

Thank you, Sir Christopher. I am always guided by your wisdom. I will attempt to restrain my remarks as much as possible, although, I am not sure whether I can get them done in 45 minutes. I hope I will be much briefer than that, because quite a lot of what I wanted to say this afternoon has already been said. That is a reflection of the very high quality debate that we have had.

I do not want to go overboard about this and start saying things such as, “Better fewer, but better”—better being the watchword for these sorts of occasions—which is actually a quote from Lenin, but it reflects very well on the Members present. I could not have asked for a better group of parliamentarians to debate this issue. Between us, we have addressed in a sober manner both the pluses and the minuses of where we stand on emissions. For the second day running, I congratulate the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) not only on securing the debate, but on the quality and content of what he had to say. I know that is probably a career-limiting move on the part of an Opposition Front-Bench spokesperson, but I really think that the hon. Gentleman did ample justice to his brief, albeit perhaps he pulled some punches a little because of his party political position. Overall, his speech was a sound and good exposition of both the pluses and minuses of our progress on climate change.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray in the Chair]

I will come back to one or two things that the hon. Gentleman said, but I also want to say that valuable additional points were made by Members from my party and the Scottish National party. My hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd) emphasised the importance of buildings, heat pumps and the seismic change in delivery that we have to get into over the next period. Those were well made points, which reflected how we talk about what we have achieved so far and what we have to do in the future. That is a central point in our discussions.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) made some important points about transport and the difference between what we think we have achieved by putting something down on a piece of paper, and, when we follow it through, where we think that has got to. That was exemplified in her comments on the 900 buses that have allegedly been procured. Indeed, I was present at the visit to the buses yesterday, along with her and other hon. Members. That exemplified that we have some things that are an obvious next step in the decarbonisation of the transport sector. If it is possible to embrace an entire bus, we should be running off with those examples and planting them everywhere in the country as quickly as possible, yet we appear to be falling down badly in terms of how we roll out that fine ambition over a period of time.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) emphasised the role that local government and a cross-departmental approach can play in the fight to reduce emissions across the board. He made a number of very telling points about what local government can and cannot do, and how much needs to be entrusted to local government in order to bring about emissions reductions.

I return to one or two of the comments made by the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire. He made the important point that if we are to have a balanced assessment of where we have come from and what we are trying to get to, we should neither condemn a Government—or, in this case, the two Governments we have had from the turn of the century to today, or three if we count the coalition—for doing nothing, nor praise them for doing everything. We have to have a clear line between those two positions to make a sober assessment of just how much we have to do, and to place our successes and failures so far in context.

As the hon. Member also said, it is only possible to decarbonise our power sector once, which is an important observation for our record so far. Some people, talking about where we have got to, might say that we have done better than a number of other countries in the world, that we have reduced emissions substantially while expanding our economy, and then stand back with folded arms and say, “There we are—it is pretty much done, isn’t it?” The Climate Change Committee’s report gives a telling antidote to that stance. It draws our attention to not just changes in UK emissions over the period 2000 to 2020, but changes by sector.

A useful chart appears on page 20 of the report—I see hon. Members flicking through their copies to find it—which shows that there has been a stupendous change in emissions from electricity supply. We have done a fantastic job of decarbonising our emissions from electricity supply, which have plummeted from annual emissions of about 160 megatonnes of CO₂ in 2000 to less than 45 megatonnes of CO₂. We see the wisdom of the point made by the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire—we can only decarbonise these things once. Although we should go much further, and it is good that we have seen a proposal for the complete decarbonisation of the power sector by 2035, we will not be able to repeat that reduction in emissions in that sector, so we cannot set that achievement against what we need to do next in the areas we need to concentrate on for the future.

That same chart is alarming in a number of areas. We must enter a caveat about the deep reduction in emissions from aviation and surface transport during the pandemic, because all the evidence already suggests that they will pretty quickly return to their previous levels. In general, despite some reduction in emissions from manufacturing and construction over the period and a smaller reduction in buildings—albeit a flat line in recent years—emissions in most other sectors are flat or increasing. That means that, in effect, measures in those sectors either have not started or have been completely ineffective in reducing emissions. As we look at the overall picture, it is important to be able to say, “We have done well here and we have done badly there,” and, when we are judging the totals, we must carefully take that into account.

We must also carefully consider the proportion of emissions in those sectors. For example, electricity supply—power stations—currently accounts for 15% of emissions. Yes, we can achieve a reduction in emissions there, but those emissions as a percentage of total emissions are now about the same as those from agriculture and land use, yet emissions from that area have stayed static in the period. Therefore, among other things, if we continue to make progress in particular areas, as has been described, but others stay static, they will represent an increasing, and increasingly intractable, part of our emissions over the next period. To do nothing about aviation, shipping, surface transport and, certainly, agriculture and land use, or to ignore them or put them in the background, is nearing criminal. If we leave them out, they will be impossible to pull back later.

We need to look at the progress made under the plans in those areas and how well they are getting us towards the same emissions curve as we see in the power sector, and as soon as possible. In that context, the Climate Change Committee’s report to Parliament is telling. The committee is the most polite organisation that one could come across. Not only is it unfailingly courteous in personal dealings with Members but all its reports have “courteous” written through them, like a stick of rock. It does not jump up and down and scream, and it does not over-hype its statements; quite the opposite. Where necessary, it is careful to caveat them as far as possible. In those circumstances, it is sometimes accused of being a bit soft. I do not think it is, but it is rigorously careful and accurate in what it tries to do.

However, in reading between the lines, the progress report is a pretty coruscating condemnation of progress, particularly in the areas that I have represented to hon. Members. As hon. Members have mentioned, page 24 of the summary report shows the areas where progress falls far short of the Government’s stated ambition and commitments. In some areas the Government’s commitment meets what the Climate Change Committee said should be the pathway. However, in a number of other areas their commitment is failing very badly, and those areas represent a large chunk of the overall emissions coming down the road, while those where they are succeeding often account for relatively small amounts of emissions. We need to try to get that into proportion as well.

Looking at what the Climate Change Committee said, something that we ought to think carefully about, which we have not done particularly this afternoon, is that the progress report is about not only mitigation but adaptation. Although there is a separate adaptation report, it comes under the overall ambit of the general report to Parliament. On adaptation, the committee says:

“A robust plan is needed for adaptation. The UK does not yet have a vision for successful adaptation to climate change, nor measurable targets to assess progress. Not one of the 34 priority areas assessed in this year’s progress report on adaptation is yet demonstrating strong progress in adapting to climate risk. Policies are being developed without sufficient recognition of the need to adapt to the changing climate. This undermines their goals, locks in climate risks, and stores up costs for the future.”

That almost sounds not terribly polite. It is waving a red flag about the disgraceful complete lack of any plan for serious Government action in this country on adaptation, which will really turn around to bite us in the near future if we do not get our act together. If the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire is minded to apply for a further debate in this Chamber, I would suggest a specific debate on adaptation. It is a very important area, which we have largely missed out on, and we do so at our peril.

The committee’s report also reflected on the fact that, at the time it was written, the Government were in the process of producing a number of reports that had been promised for quite a while but had not arisen, such as the net zero plan, the transport plan, the hydrogen plan, and the heat and buildings strategy, which the Climate Change Committee was unable to incorporate into its report to Parliament because they were still anticipated. Just this week, no fewer than 1,800 pages of material finally came tumbling out of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Treasury and so on, with 10 days to go to COP26, rectifying a number of those emissions. I am afraid that, try as I might, I have not been able to get through all 1,800 pages by any means. It is apparent from reading those just how far off we are from getting to grips with things that the Climate Change Committee mentioned in its report.

Let me take the “Heat and Buildings Strategy”, which has just come out, as an example. I do not particularly blame the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy for this, and hon. Members will have to take it from me, but the “Heat and Buildings Strategy”, which is an interesting report, has been written, in what we might call Shakespearean authorship analysis, by several different hands—I do not include the Minister in that. Broadly, I can say that the right questions have been written by one series of hands, and the wrong answers have been written by another series of hands, so the report does not cohere.

The answers to the ambition that the Climate Change Committee was concerned to underpin in its report to Parliament are not very ambitious at all. There is a really lame response to the question of how we go about the insulation and energy efficiency uprating of our homes, which, as everybody knows by now, is a sine qua non of a load of actions in other areas, as we have mentioned already.

The hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) unpacked some of the issues on heat pumps. We know that they will not work in badly insulated homes. We have an ambition for heat pumps, but there are all sorts of issues even within the report about the difference between the ambition of 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2030 and the practical issue of who will be trained up to install them, whether they will be manufactured in this country, and which sectors will have heat pumps in them. I note, for example, on the Government’s ambition for 300,000 homes a year, that it is suggested that heat pumps will go into only about 60% of them, so we have the prospect of new homes being built with gas boilers in them, which will have to be retrofitted pretty shortly afterwards, but we will perhaps let that pass us by.

On how the paper addresses our overall ambitions, the sector, as the strategy sets out, occupies 23% of emissions just on heat. So when we talk about the energy sector, we are talking about heat being much more important in terms of emissions than power, and it is heat that we have made virtually no progress on at all. The overwhelming majority of our homes are still heated by gas, and that figure has remained fairly static for a fairly long time. A strategy that proposes more heat pumps only works if we deal with other heat factors, particularly how much heat we lose from our buildings, how meaner we could be in our use of heat in buildings in future, and what sort of win-wins we might have in insulating our homes, and we must deal with fuel poverty and various other such things.

One would think that a strategy of energy efficiency should run alongside everything else that we do on heat generation. That one thing, with the exception of some short-term, fairly small amounts of funding for particular projects in the strategy, is sorely missing. I do not know, but I would speculate, bearing in mind the different authors of the report, that perhaps a much more ambitious strategy was in the minds of BEIS, and certain other people came along and crossed a nought off the end of each of the amounts of money in the strategy. It woefully misses the opportunity to really go forward on getting heat firmly in our sights as far as decarbonisation is concerned.

The hydrogen strategy that has come out is interesting, premised on the progress report to Parliament. It does not have any path by which we can develop green hydrogen, which of course is the element of hydrogen that will do the work of decarbonisation. Unless we have a decent path for developing green hydrogen over the period, we will not make the progress that we should on climate change and emission reductions.

As I said, I have yet to go through all of this, but I think we are simply not articulating our own ambition on carbon reduction and getting the details of how we do it right. Indeed, not only are we a long way from that in some instances, but in others we are not even addressing it. I am interested to reflect on the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West about the nudge unit report that came out recently. It was nudged into public view and pretty immediately nudged out again, within I think a day of being published. One of the reasons for that is because the nudge unit drew our attention to some very difficult areas that we have to get to grips with, but we have hitherto walked on by on the other side of the street.

I know that to my cost. Recently, I think at a fringe meeting at the Labour party conference, I ventured the opinion that we will have far fewer livestock farmers in our country in 20 years’ time. That is a straightforward statement of understanding of what we have to do in the agricultural and land use sector, what we have to do about our diets and how we deal with emissions in our food chain, and many such things. I got absolute grief. Indeed, I got a number of angry invitations in my in-tray to visit some farms and see what is really happening, and so on. I know it is a really difficult issue, and that we will have to do a lot of just transition-type work in getting it right, but it is an issue that we have to face. I am afraid that the Government are not doing that in a number of areas as far as emission reductions are concerned.

My conclusion, which I hope will be pretty widely shared across the Chamber, is that although we have done well so far in our emission reductions process, we need to unpack that to understand where we have done quite well and where we have done badly, so that we have better pointers for the future. As things stand, we appear to be nowhere near meeting the challenges ahead of us on climate change reduction. A lot more new policies and new thinking will be needed to get us anywhere near those targets. Regrettably, as the strategies come out they do not appear to rise to that challenge. I hope that this afternoon the Minister will be able to respond to the debate in that vein, because I hope that I have given a reasonably accurate picture of what the Climate Change Committee says and what hon. Members have said in this Chamber today.

I have not quite taken my 45 minutes, Sir Christopher—[Interruption.] Sorry, Mrs Murray; while I was talking, you snuck into the Chair.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (in the Chair)]

I snuck in.

[Dr Whitehead]

Obviously, the previous Chair just could not stand the idea of being there for the entirety of my speech and has left.

I hope that this debate will serve as almost a watchword for how we approach our task over the next period. We need to work soberly, carefully and, as far as possible, on a consensual basis, for the future of our climate goals, but also with a clear-eyed recognition of just how far we have to go and how difficult many of the choices will be. We need to face them together, creating solutions that can actually work in our national and, indeed, international interests.

By the way, even though it was very late in the day, I understand just how much work has gone into these documents and how hard people have worked at getting them out, and indeed how they have attempted to address the choices in front of us in a real way. I do not underestimate any of that. My criticisms are based on what we have to do politically to address these issues for the future. I am not in any way attempting to denigrate the people who have put these documents together.

That is the offer from the Opposition, and that is what we want to do—to move us forward in the face of this tremendous challenge and the really daunting task ahead of us. And if we can manage to conduct our future debates as well as we have managed to conduct today’s debate, that will be a great help in this process.

[The Minister of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Greg Hands)]

Let me begin by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for nominating this important debate today, and I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) for his very able introduction to it. We were sitting in exactly these seats yesterday during his last Westminster Hall debate, which was on the interesting subject of carbon capture and storage, a subject that has also cropped up in today’s debate.

Of course it is vital that we focus on clean growth and the Government’s vision for transitioning to a net zero economy. This has been a very useful debate, with a very high degree of consensus, which of course the Government welcome.

First, the Government welcome the Climate Change Committee’s 2021 “Progress in reducing emissions” report, which highlights our successes in setting an ambitious climate mitigation agenda while also providing healthy challenge to our progress to net zero by 2050. The point of having this kind of Committee is for it to keep challenging the Government and to ensure that the Government are straining every possible muscle to get to that target and get there in good time.

The report correctly emphasises that the journey to net zero is not yet half-completed and that this decade is the decisive one for tackling climate change, which Britain must take a leading role in. Of course, that is why on Tuesday we published our net zero strategy, which has been referred to many times; I welcome the Opposition’s praise for my officials and my ministerial team for the work that they have put into it. I know that a lot of my team have been working very long hours to get the strategy out there and to do so on time.

The strategy delivers a comprehensive set of measures to support and capitalise on the UK’s transition to net zero by 2050. It outlines measures to transition to a green and sustainable future, and to help businesses and consumers to move to clean power, supporting hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs and leveraging up to £90 billion worth of private investment by 2030.

We have already set out a lot about our journey to net zero. Over the past year alone, we have published the Prime Minister’s 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution, the energy White Paper, the North sea transition deal, the industrial decarbonisation strategy, the transport decarbonisation plan, the hydrogen strategy and, most recently, our heat and buildings strategy.

[Dr Whitehead]

Would the Minister be able to provide us with some helpful guidance on the production of those documents, and set it against what the Climate Change Committee has been doing with its carbon budgets and so on? Does he consider that as a result of those documents being published and their contents, we are now on course to meet the terms of the sixth carbon budget?

--- Later in debate ---

[Greg Hands]

Again, that is a temptation down a particular road, but let me say this. The Government are absolutely clear that all further airport expansions must be consistent with our climate change obligations. Government policy is absolutely clear on that.

[Dr Whitehead]

Will the Minister give way?

[Greg Hands]

I will make a bit more progress.

Nothing in a trade agreement prevents our ability to regulate environmentally or prevents the UK fulfilling its climate change obligations. The hon. Lady asked about COP26 leaders, and I can give her an update. We have a stellar array of world leaders coming for COP26, including President Biden and the four Ms—Prime Minister Modi, Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, President Macron and Chancellor Merkel. We have leaders of medium-sized economies who will be really important. I spoke earlier today with the Vietnamese Energy Minister Dien and the Vietnamese Prime Minister Chinh is coming. Vietnam is an important player, as well as an important ally and friend to the UK. Its current plans are to double coal usage over the next decade, which will not set the right tone at COP26. We are looking forward to welcoming a wide variety of leaders, some of which are close friends and allies of the UK, and developing economies, of which Vietnam is just one, are also coming.

In terms of the carbon border adjustment mechanism, we watch all the proposals very closely. We need to make sure they are World Trade Organisation compatible, that they are not a disguised form of protectionism and that they do not discriminate unnecessarily against developing countries. Departmental policy decisions are consistent with net zero. We have established two Cabinet Committees dedicated to climate change. The Environment Bill requires the Government to reflect environmental issues in national policy making through consideration of the five environmental principles.

Where are the two EV buses? We have delivered the national bus strategy, investing £12 billion in local transport systems over the current Parliament and delivering 4,000 new zero-emission buses.

The hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) spoke of a scenario where one person on a street puts in solar panels and everybody else says, “I want a piece of the action.” That is a great example of the Government simulating demand. It does not mean that the Government should come down the road and install everybody’s solar panels, though. It shows the effectiveness of Government policy in getting people to sit up, take notice and want to take advantage of something. That is what the role of the Government can be. Heat pumps will be exactly the same.

[Greg Hands]

I have already outlined the support we are giving to the housing sector overall. If the hon. Gentleman or any other hon. Member wants to write to me with a specific proposal, I am happy to look at it. I have to say, I was not entirely sure about his recent history—he mentioned COP21 in relation to the election of Donald Trump, which of course came after that, but I may be misremembering his speech, so I will not go down that road.

How many people have been trained in heat pumps so far? We want more to be trained. The figure is around 3,000 and we require 35,000, so that is definitely a challenging position. We have set out Government policy and the direction of travel on heat pumps very clearly and we are waiting for the market to respond.

[Dr Whitehead]

Will the Minister give way?

[Greg Hands]

I am going to make progress. On Germany’s net-zero strategy, I shared a platform with the German ambassador last night, and both of our countries are very supportive of each other’s policies on net zero and the environment. We consider ourselves to be world leaders in this space. On retrofitting, we are committed to supporting businesses and households to upgrade energy efficiency in buildings.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Whitehead]

Will the Minister give way?

[Greg Hands]

I am going to make a bit more progress. We intend to upgrade as many homes as possible to energy performance certificate band C by 2035.

The hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) talked about the heat pump grant scheme. I am amazed by that. It is a devolved matter, but there have been discussions with the Scottish Government about the Scottish Government joining up with us and participating in this scheme; but if I understand the situation correctly, they have refused. The irony is that the Ofgem team that will be administering the England and Wales scheme will be based in Glasgow, with more than 100 new members of staff. Unless they have a very long commute, they will not be able to benefit from the scheme that they are helping to administer, due to the fact that the Scottish Government have said that they will not be joining the UK Government in the scheme. That is a great pity.

--- Later in debate ---

[Greg Hands]

The Barnett consequentials will of course be enacted in the usual way as we would expect, but why not join with a scheme that has been very well received, that I think will be a market leader and that will, ironically, be administered out of Glasgow? It makes perfect sense for the Scottish Government to come on board with us.

We have made huge investments in offshore wind and other renewables in Scotland. The hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun mentioned the 5 GW target for hydrogen being less than in Germany. It is the same as Germany’s target—they have exactly the same target. On wave and tidal, we have already put down more than £175 million in innovation funding across this country, with 10 MW already deployed. In many senses, they are still pre-commercial technologies, but we are making the investment to increase the optionality that will be available in wave and tidal.

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s overall support for the UK’s targets and ambitions. He mentioned reforms to the electricity market. We recently published a call for evidence on actions to align capacity markets with net zero and actions to encourage the participation of more low-carbon capacity. We are committed to accelerating the deployment of low-cost renewable generation through the contracts for difference regime and by undertaking the review of the frequency of CfD options.

The hon. Member for Southampton, Test, in a comprehensive speech, congratulated us on our success in decarbonising electricity generation. I go back to the commitment given to complete that process by 2035. He said that we are ignoring other areas. I do not think that is fair and I do not think that is the case. He talked about adaptation. We are currently developing a national adaptation programme, which is due in 2023. DEFRA published the response to the Climate Change Committee’s adaptation report, which goes into more detail on our progress on adapting to climate change.

On fossil fuels and net zero, of course net zero does not necessarily mean zero residual emissions in all sectors of the economy. It is, after all, a net zero figure. In aviation, agriculture and industry it may not be feasible, practical or cost-effective to eliminate all emissions.

I thank the hon. Member for Southampton, Test for his praise for the hard work put in by my officials on producing the reports.

The hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun asked, “Where is the Treasury review of the cost of net zero?” I have news for him—I emailed it to him about 15 minutes ago. It was published on Monday night. It is entitled, “Net Zero Review: Analysis exploring the key issues”. There are 135 pages for him to digest before I see him next, when he can ask me questions about it. It was published at the same time as, or just before, the net zero strategy.

In the past few years, the Government have gone further than ever before to ensure that the climate is at the heart of our decision making. We have taken new approaches to embed net zero in spending decisions, including requiring Departments to include greenhouse gas emissions in their spending review bids and their impact on meeting carbon budgets and net zero. As I already said, we have established two Cabinet Committees. The integrated review reflects that and ensures that it is the Government’s No. 1 international priority. We are also using the Environment Bill to require the Government to reflect all these issues in national policy.

We are committed to taking a whole-system approach to the net zero challenge, ensuring that we understand and can navigate the complex ways that our climate goals will interact with other priorities for the country. As I mentioned, we published the heat and buildings strategy, which sets out the required actions to decarbonise buildings over the next decade, helping meet near-term carbon budgets and getting us on track for net zero by 2050.

[Dr Whitehead]

Now that he has almost finished, will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Greg Hands]

I will finish, as I have been speaking for almost half an hour. The net zero strategy sets out clear principles on how we will engage the public and support them to make green choices. We will explore how to enhance public-facing climate content and advice on gov.uk and our Simple Energy Advice service to provide homeowners with advice for decarbonising their homes, including tailored retrofit advice in local areas.

I thank the CCC once again for its expertise and advice in producing its annual report. The Government are committed to delivering a net zero economy, and we welcome the committee’s contribution to this obligation. The net zero strategy sets out a roadmap to cut emissions and create new jobs across the whole country. It comes as the UK prepares to host the UN COP26 summit next week, where the Prime Minister will lead by example and call on other world economies to set out their own domestic plans for cutting emissions. Through the strategy, we are accelerating towards more resilient futures, towards our green recovery and towards protecting our planet for this generation and those to come.