Carbon Budget Delivery Plan

Greg Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. Since the Labour Government took office, they have pursued an ideological net zero agenda that places meeting targets above supporting our constituents and cutting bills across the country. The carbon budget delivery plan is the latest example of that: a glossy plan that completely ignores affordability and reality.

The Secretary of State has spent much of his time in office promising that his policies will cut household energy bills by £300. That promise was made at the last election and was supported by the Prime Minister, yet that figure is not mentioned once in the flagship carbon budget delivery plan. There are sections on energy security and lower bills, but nowhere does it reference the £300 promise that the Secretary of State and others from the Labour party incessantly trumpeted across the media and from the Dispatch Box. If that pledge were real—if it were costed or credible—it would surely appear in the document that is supposedly designed to deliver it. Its absence tells us everything. The Government’s priority is not cutting bills, but chasing net zero goals regardless of the cost to hard-working taxpayers.

At a recent Energy Security and Net Zero Committee hearing, senior executives from the country’s biggest energy suppliers warned that even if gas were free in 2030, household energy bills would still rise because of the policy costs being loaded on to bills in the relentless pursuit of net zero. I repeat: even if gas were free—even if the wholesale market delivered us a miracle—bills would go up, not down. That is a failure not of the market, but of Labour Government policy.

Those energy companies are not hostile to decarbonisation; they are some of the loudest champions of net zero. Yet even they warn that the current approach—piling levies, subsidies and obligations on to consumers—is unsustainable and unrealistic. When those who believe in the Government’s energy objectives start doubting the approach, perhaps it is time for the Government to revisit their plans. Even Professor Sir Dieter Helm, one of the country’s most respected energy economists, has in effect described the Government’s clean power 2030 plan as economically incoherent. As he put it, we are

“baking in very high costs”

for the future. He is right.

It is not possible to legislate for lower bills while loading more costs on to every unit of power people use—a simple equation that the Government do not seem to have grasped, exemplified by what we have all seen in the carbon budget delivery plan. It is a classic Labour approach: a headline without a policy, a promise without a plan, a bill for everyone else to pay, and a vanity project that will simply not work. The truth is that Britain will not decarbonise by taxing, banning and bribing people into submission.

As the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), said at our party conference, the best way to cut emissions is to “make electricity cheap”. Cheap means clean power, because people and businesses naturally choose the most efficient technology available when it saves them money. This Government, however, have made electricity the most expensive form of energy that we produce. They have loaded every kilowatt with green levies, obligations and subsidies, and then tried to subsidise and redistribute when families cannot afford to heat their homes or to switch to electric vehicles.

We see the same erratic pattern in the operation of the Climate Change Act 2008, which forces Ministers to take decisions that make the British people less well off and our economy weaker, for the sake of meeting arbitrary climate targets. Take their boiler tax: it increases the cost of gas boilers to force people to adopt heat pumps, which may not work for them, to meet climate targets. We are chopping down trees in America, shipping them across the Atlantic and burning them in Yorkshire to generate electricity at three times the price of gas, because it is labelled as clean for the purpose of meeting the Government’s climate targets.

These are not the decisions of a Government guided by science or economics; they are the decisions of a Government trapped by targets, with a Secretary of State dogmatically following them. If the Government truly believed in innovation, they would focus on reforming the electricity market to bring prices down; they would remove the outdated levies that make our electricity the most expensive in the world; they would spend more on nuclear baseload; and they would back British energy security, from new nuclear to North sea gas, rather than making us more dependent on imported fuel by choosing to shut down the North sea.

The public understand that we must reduce emissions. They want a cleaner environment and a stable climate for their grandchildren. But they also expect honesty from the Government, and an approach that will actually work and actually decarbonise.