Net Zero (Industry and Regulators Committee)

Baroness Northover Excerpts

Friday 20th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee for its work and the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, for opening this debate so compellingly. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who is seeking to make such a difference in this area as chair of the excellent Peers for the Planet.

It is excellent, of course, that the UK put in place the first Climate Change Act, committing Governments to change. That Act has been the model for elsewhere, and so has the Climate Change Committee, which scrutinises what the UK is doing and measures it against what needs to happen. The UK has made some impressive commitments, including ending the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030; ending the sale of gas boilers, theoretically, from 2035; and reaching net zero by 2050.

If there was one positive thing to come out of Liz Truss’s brief tenure in Downing Street, it was surely commissioning Chris Skidmore to review how we were doing in meeting those commitments. It is all very well having these ambitions, but are the “guard-rails” in place—as he puts it—to deliver this? This is where a far less positive theme emerges, and it is echoed throughout this paper. The Government do not seem to have an effective strategy for delivering what they promise, as all noble Lords have said. As the committee says:

“We are not persuaded that the necessary level of policy detail is in place to achieve these commitments.”


The committee goes on:

“Given the scale of change involved in transforming the energy system by 2035, the Government must act urgently to make the necessary decisions and set out the detailed policies and funding models to allow investment to flow into the sector.”


As the noble Lord, Lord Reay, emphasised, this requires a major increase in funding. As the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, said, it also requires a transformation in planning and strategy. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, aptly described the Government going “off to the pub” on this.

The noble Lord, Lord Hollick, laid out some specifics of what is required, including a transformation task force within government and amending Ofgem’s duties to include explicit reference to having due regard to the net-zero target—something which Chris Skidmore’s review also recommends. The noble Lord, Lord Burns, emphasised that financial and strategic commitment is vital if investment and development are to be stepped up. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and others emphasised that political leadership is vital.

As we have heard, the committee urged clarity and speed in a number of different areas, including long-term storage technologies; funding mechanisms for small modular reactors and carbon capture and storage; funding for energy efficiency and heat pumps; and that by the end of 2024 the Government should set out a road map of what they envisage the net-zero energy mix of the future to consist of. I am a member, as is the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, of the Environment and Climate Change Committee, which is looking at heat pumps. It is already very clear that ambition and reality are at huge variance.

This report was concluded almost a year ago. The Government published a weak response in 2022, mentioning reports that have not yet appeared. The committee followed up in December with a list of questions on specific areas which must be delivered at speed if net zero is to be realised and, as the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, mentioned, if we are not to fall behind the EU and the US. The collapse of Britishvolt does not augur well. The committee requested a response before this report was debated. As of yesterday when I looked, it was not forthcoming, so I gather it has not been produced. The noble Lord, Lord Hollick, told us that Davos intervened. The invasion of Ukraine might not have been anticipated, but Davos surely should have been.

There was a successful legal challenge to the Government over their not being on course to deliver net zero or their obligations under the Climate Change Act. The judge in that case required that the Government update their strategy by this spring. As the noble Lord, Lord Burns, said, it cannot be business as usual: strategy and commitment are urgently required, so the strategy had better not be warm words and plans alone. The committee’s report makes it clear that transformative actions are urgently required. I hope that the Minister will give some specific answers in his response; if he does not, it will further illustrate what the committee has been saying. I noticed that during the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, the Minister seemed to find either the speech or something else rather amusing. So, when the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, asks for a strategy—promised since 2014—I hope the answer will not be “soon” or “in due course”.

I might say this, might I not? But when Vince Cable put in place an industrial strategy which emphasised and, more to the point, supported the UK’s biomedical sector, having analysed the strengths and weaknesses of the UK’s industrial sector, it helped to lay the groundwork for our global position on vaccine development when the pandemic struck. It very much built on our academic strengths, to which the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, referred.

We are now facing an even bigger challenge. Do we have evidence of a strategic approach here? I am afraid that we do not. Maybe the Minister’s amusement, as also expressed during the speeches by the noble Lords, Lord Whitty and Lord Bilimoria, means that he will confound us when he replies with a solid strategy, backed by the Treasury, with specific answers to what this committee has rightly demanded. This is too important just to be met with warm words.