Carbon Budget Delivery Plan

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) on securing the debate and introducing it in the way she did.

To misquote Bill Clinton, “It’s a limit, not a target, stupid!” The carbon budgets we set represent a threshold we should not breach, not a target we should aim for or just dip under. We are having this debate now because our courts ruled that the original carbon budget delivery plan was unlawful; it lacked credible plans to meet our obligations.

Published just two days before the legal deadline, the Government’s new plan states that they have sufficient policies to achieve their sixth carbon budget, which required a 77% reduction in emissions from the 1990 baseline. So, do they? Remember that carbon budget 6 is the first to include international aviation and shipping. The plan highlights where decarbonisation will be the hardest, and shows us those sectors that need to be prioritised if we are to achieve a totally clean, secure and affordable energy system by 2050. Our homes and buildings’ operational and embodied carbon need to be addressed, and our heavy industries, such as steel, glass and ceramics, need to find high-energy, low-cost solutions. The aviation sector must show how it can meet the Government’s expansion expectations without an over-optimistic reliance on the production of sustainable aviation fuel or a dependence on greenhouse gas removal technologies that are still not proven at commercial scale.

First, let us examine the energy and emissions projections that undergird the plan. The emissions projections include all planned, adopted, implemented and expired climate change policies. They are expected to deliver more than 100% of the emissions reductions to meet carbon budgets 4 and 5, but are projected to contribute only 76% of the savings needed for carbon budget 6. Over the summer, the Climate Change Committee examined 163 of those plans for reducing emissions. Fewer than half were considered to be fully credible, and more than a third were considered to be insufficient or to have significant risk of failure. On its top recommendation—to make electricity cheaper—the committee said that it had “not…seen any progress” in the past year.

It is good that the plans are improving and becoming more credible year on year, but the delivery plan states only that the Government “expect” the energy and emissions projections to deliver the requisite emissions reductions. It does not say that they are confident or give a percentage of probability, as we find in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The excellent people at Carbon Brief note that by counting all the various policies—past, present and future—alongside other modelling adjustments, the baseline for carbon budget 6 is already reduced by 46.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

The policies assume the success of the zero emission vehicle mandate and the SAF mandate—policies that are still very much in the pipeline. The SAF mandate Bill is still only on Second Reading in the House of Lords. The first warning I give, then, is that the first tranche of policies—at table 3 in the plan—cannot be taken as a given, even though they have been incorporated into the lowering of the baseline for how we measure CB6.

Warning No. 2 concerns what the plan terms “wider factors”. That principally means the adoption of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, that are likely to improve energy efficiency, help integrate renewable energy generation and support sustainable practices, according to the technical annexe. The Government’s analysis finds that those wider factors, which also include consumer behaviour, could reduce emissions by an average of 20 megatonnes of CO₂ equivalent a year over the period of CB6, from 2033 to 2037. The annexe admits that there is

“the potential for not all of these reductions to be realised”,

before saying that it “reflects a cautious approach”. I will await the CCC’s full assessment of whether these wider savings are realistic in its 2026 progress report.

The Environmental Audit Committee has recently published its report on warning No. 3, aviation. The final hearing of our inquiry was told that demand management would not be one of the measures to reduce emissions in the sector. Shockingly, that was despite the fact that in its advice on carbon budget 7, the Climate Change Committee said that demand management should account for 54% of emissions reductions in the sector by 2040. SAF only accounted for 33%, and efficiency improvements of technology were a paltry 13%.

The Department for Transport says that aviation can be fossil fuel-free by 2050 without demand management. Will the Minister ensure that the Government publish that unlikely analysis so that we can properly examine it? I am in no doubt that the Climate Change Committee will be keen to do so. I note that the committee clearly states that

“the aviation industry adopting the cost of aviation decarbonisation will help manage demand”.

Both the CCC and the recently published Whitehead review are very clear that the aviation sector must pay for the carbon that it pollutes in accordance with the polluter-pays principle.

The Whitehead review recommends that the sector should be required to pay for the greenhouse gas removals it needs to reach net zero, and that Government should ensure that they do so. A fossil-free sector will drive competition between SAF technologies and the new greenhouse gas removal technologies, which is a good thing and to be welcomed, but getting those technologies up and running with far greater urgency is an imperative, given the Government’s desire to go ahead with airport expansion. I remain sceptical at best about the Government’s approach to aviation, and it surely has to be seen as one of the biggest potential pitfalls in their net zero plans, relying so heavily as they do on technology that is not currently readily available.

The fourth warning is one voiced by many climate scientists, such as Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester. It is that the Climate Change Committee appears to have changed its mandate from advising Government on what they must do to meet the scientific realities, to advising the Government only what they consider the Government will find politically acceptable and be willing to accept.

I have been a champion of the Climate Change Committee. I believe its independence and forthright advice have been why we managed to achieve such enormous bipartisan progress in tackling climate change. I commend the previous Conservative Government on all the progress they made on that, and I think we need to restore that bipartisanship. However, Professor Anderson rightly warns:

“Major societal transformations, such as moving from private car to public transport, are largely absent from the CCC’s recommendations.”

Instead, the CCC proposes that the UK should capture and store 36 megatonnes of CO₂ annually by 2050, triple the current rate of the entire planet—I will say that again: triple the current rate of the entire planet—to avoid making that recommendation to a modal shift from private vehicles to public transport. That smacks to me of the committee dodging the tough advice where it thinks the Government might find it politically unwelcome.

My advice to the committee is to grow a pair. Over-optimistic reliance on future technofixes is not a solid policy basis to achieve the carbon budgets and reductions that we have set. The projection for carbon budget 6 is that we will be just 2 megatonnes within the 965-megatonne limit for that period. That takes me right back to where I started: these budgets are not targets to scrape under as narrowly as possible while trying to change as little about our way of life as we can. We did not carry on as normal during the covid pandemic, just waiting for the vaccine to come and save us. Instead, we acted urgently to fundamentally change the way we operated to protect the most vulnerable.

If we carry on as normal, seeking to do just about enough, we risk overshooting our carbon budgets. In doing so, we fail future generations, and we fail those in the global majority for whom the planet has already warmed too much—whose crops are failing through drought, whose homes are already under floodwater, and whose forests are already burning. Let us all be clear; the costs of inaction on climate change are far greater than the costs of action. That is why the carbon budgets are so important. It is all our responsibility to ensure that we have adequate policies in place to deliver them.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Chris McDonald)]

I can say with absolute sincerity that it is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I could not have wished for a more benevolent Chair for my first outing at the Dispatch Box here in Westminster Hall. I apologise to Members who may have been expecting the Minister for Climate, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Katie White), but she is attending the COP. I do hope that I am not too mean a substitute.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the debate. We all recognise how important the issue is. For me, it has been a real pleasure to sit and listen attentively to colleagues from throughout the House with such expertise. I shall endeavour to respond to many of the remarks that have been made, although I feel slightly sorry for the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith). Everyone else in the Chamber challenged the Government for being too fast or too slow, while ultimately working towards the same objective, but he occupied a slightly lonely position. That is the position his party has chosen to take.

An investment in fighting the climate crisis, and in net zero, is fundamentally an investment for our future generations. The economic opportunity before us can improve the lives of working people not only in the future but here and now, and our policies are intended to do precisely that. We want to tackle the climate crisis while ensuring that we crowd-in private sector investment. In Prime Minister’s questions earlier, my right hon. and learned Friend the Prime Minister mentioned the £33 billon investment from SSE; the pursuit of net zero is clearly the pursuit of economic prosperity. Members have already mentioned the fact that the Confederation of British Industry says the green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, as are the good jobs provided by the green energy sector around the country.

Carbon budgets were a significant part of the debate. Ten years ago, the world was on course for 4° of warming, which would have posed a severe threat to human life. Today, through international action, we are on course for 2.6°, or below 2° if countries meet their full climate commitments. I was asked earlier about the Government’s focus at COP; fundamentally, our focus is multilateralism to get the world working together again. Of course, that is about ensuring that Britain retains its place as a climate leader, and that we do so in a way that supports communities and families through the UK’s transition.

I was pleased to hear the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is no longer in his place, bring home the importance of thinking about the poorest in our society. I want to reassure him, and the House, that they are very much in my mind, and the minds of all Ministers, as we take forward these issues. That is why we are so concerned about getting bills down.

The previous Government left us an energy system that was tied to the international price of gas, which has left households with gas prices 75% higher than they were the year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We have decided not to leave our future in the hands of international dictators and petrostates, but to return to energy security. That is what clean power provides us, and that is why we set up Great British Energy, which invests in the necessary kinds of projects. It also invests in community energy projects, which were mentioned by many Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central.

[Barry Gardiner]

Does the Minister recognise that the policy costs mentioned by the shadow Minister are a regressive tax, and that it may be better to put those on to general taxation? Of course, the energy company obligations and other policy costs were introduced by the Conservative Government. Will the Minister give consideration to where they may best lie to ensure that what he said in response to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) is realised?

[Chris McDonald]

Matters of tax are left to the Chancellor, particularly this close to the Budget.

The Government’s approach to the transition is about incentives rather than punishments—it is about carrots rather than sticks. The economics are working in the direction of net zero, and net zero is no longer a political discussion, wherever the Opposition think they are. Net zero is an economic discussion, and one in which industry has been quite clear about where the benefits lie. As industry is decarbonising, it is also digitising, automating and becoming more productive. That is what will fundamentally drive down costs for consumers and provide good jobs.

Essentially, we have a choice ahead of us about the type of country that we become. We can either seize this opportunity and capture international investment, which is going two to one into green energy versus fossil fuel energy, or take the regressive approach of the Opposition, which leaves us at the mercy of petrostates.