Climate Change

Carla Denyer Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

I thank the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy), my fellow member of the all-party parliamentary group on climate change, for securing this debate. The climate and nature emergencies are the most pressing issue of our time. They go to the heart of every area of Government, and we ignore or sideline them at our peril. A suppressed national security assessment report, partly released in January in response to a freedom of information request, warns:

“Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse”,

threatening UK national security and prosperity. Let us give that a moment to sink in. The first job of any Government is to keep their citizens safe, yet there is a yawning gulf between climate reality as recognised in that national security report and the actions that the Government are undertaking.

As we have heard, ambitious action now makes economic sense, too. Failing to tackle the climate and nature crises will cost far more in the long term than investing properly now. The Climate Change Committee, the Government’s own specialist advisers, recently crunched the numbers and worked out that for every pound spent on reaching net zero, the benefits outweigh the costs up to fourfold. That is a good return on investment. Crucially, the Climate Change Committee recognises that the benefits of climate action will be felt in all areas of our lives. Warm homes and better public transport will have huge benefits for our health and wellbeing, and will save the NHS money, too. The health service spends £895 million a year just as a result of cold and damp homes. While the Government are grasping the big picture in some areas, such as growing clean energy, for example, all too often that is not being done in a joined-up way. It does not feel like they are aiming for the massive social and environmental wins that acting boldly and thinking genuinely long-term could secure.

Last year, the Chancellor scrapped the energy company obligation scheme in the autumn Budget. It required energy companies to pay into programmes that cut fuel poverty. The impact of that cut falls not only on the 8.9 million households classed as fuel poor, but on jobs. The Installation Assurance Authority Federation, a leading representative body in the retrofit sector, found that a staggering 12,100 skilled professionals have been made redundant since the end of the ECO scheme was announced in the Chancellor’s Budget. A further 79,000-plus may be made redundant within the next 12 months. Such fragmented policy making, where a gap is left between an old scheme and a new scheme, puts jobs at risk and undermines ambitions on warm homes.

I acknowledge the commitment of the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, and of the Minister, to this agenda. I also acknowledge the degree to which they appear sometimes to be thwarted by the Treasury and others that seem singularly incapable of grasping that building a strong, resilient economy will be an impossibility inside an environment going haywire. They also seem to be thwarted by those who seem unwilling to understand that delaying action and an overreliance on techno fixes, such as carbon capture and storage, are paving the way for a cliff edge of social chaos and economic freefall when we should be planning for an orderly, fair, controlled transition.

Continuing to subsidise the fossil fuel industry is downright dangerous when the extraction and burning of fossil fuels is still the main driver of global warming. Burning the fossil fuels at the proposed Rosebank oil field would release more than the combined annual emissions of all 28 low-income countries globally. That is all without any evidence that that oil would bring down costs at home, because prices are set on the global market. Rather than propping up the oil and gas giants, I have been calling on the Chancellor to end the £2.7 billion of tax breaks given every year to fossil fuel companies. Instead she should fund a jobs guarantee to support workers currently employed in oil and gas to move into new green jobs.

Climate adaptation must become much more prominent, too. The Government’s climate watchdog has warned us that preparedness for extreme weather in this country is disjointed and piecemeal, and that has consequences for all our constituents, for public services and for the economy. That brings me full circle back to my opening point: the climate emergency has ramifications for every single Department and every aspect of all our constituents’ lives. That is why there was such a large appetite for the climate emergency declaration that I pioneered as a councillor in Bristol in 2018. After adopting my climate emergency declaration, Bristol ramped up its ambitions, and the idea has since spread across the UK and internationally. It shows the public’s appetite to go further and faster to protect our planet for future generations. While recognising the good work done so far, we still need vastly more ambition across government. No stone can be left unturned if we want to operate within safe climate limits.

[Bill Esterson]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Carla Denyer]

I am just coming to an end.

We must leave no stone unturned, whether it is housing standards, taxation, jobs, transport, energy, defence or food. That is my main message today, and I hope the Government are open to hearing it. It is important that we look at climate change across every single Department, because that is how we will build a safer, more positive, more equal and happier country together.

--- Later in debate ---

[Harriet Cross]

I do not know whether there has been a misunderstanding of the title of the debate—it is on climate change, not the costs of bills. For climate change, we are looking at emissions; if we are focusing on emissions, we are focusing on where the carbon is produced. There is less carbon intensity in our domestic oil and gas than in imported oil and gas. I know that is not the message that the hon. Lady or others want to hear, but those are the facts.

Being wedded to domestic emissions targets while ignoring emissions produced elsewhere is causing the deindustrialisation we are seeing across the UK. Businesses in ceramics, refining, petrochemicals, oil and gas and many more industries are packing up and leaving the UK, not because their products are needed less, but because they are unable to sustain themselves here under the weight of industrial energy prices and carbon taxes.

[Carla Denyer]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Harriet Cross]

I will not. I have taken a lot of interventions, and there is not a huge amount of time—I want to wrap up.

The targets of the Climate Change Act are forcing the UK to make decisions through the lens of emissions, not what is best for industry, electricity costs, growth, prosperity or jobs. That is why it is right that the Conservatives have committed to repealing it. The carbon tax imposed on our industry through the emissions trading scheme has also made it significantly harder for energy-intensive industries to do business in the UK. It increases costs for consumers and makes our industries less competitive.

The illogical way in which we consider domestic emissions while ignoring global emissions further undermines UK industries. Carbon leakage—exporting production, and therefore emissions, abroad—has become a convenient way for the Government to reach their emissions targets at the cost of vital UK industries. We are offshoring our industries and losing jobs, skills, taxes and investment just to import products at huge cost on huge, diesel-chugging container ships from across the world from countries that still use coal power. It is a complete contradiction of what the Government say their emissions ambitions are.

The UK has already done a lot—more than many other countries—to reduce emissions, but that cannot and must not be at any cost. From our electricity prices to the North sea, traditional industries to AI, the Secretary of State’s idealistic approach to energy policy, which focuses primarily on domestic carbon emissions, is impoverishing Britain for no benefit to global emissions.

I once again thank the hon. Member for Basingstoke for securing today’s debate. To conclude, I ask the Minister the following three questions: does she recognise the incoherence in the Government’s determination to shut down North sea production just to increase reliance on more carbon-intensive imports? When will the Government make a decision on Jackdaw and Rosebank? Will the Government adopt our plan to cut the carbon tax and adopt our cheap power plan, immediately stripping 20% off household and business electricity costs?