Draft Climate Change (Targeted Greenhouse Gases) Order 2022

Kevin Hollinrake Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 General Committees

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kevin Hollinrake)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the draft Climate Change (Targeted Greenhouse Gases) Order 2022.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Davies.

The draft order was laid before the House on 19 October 2022. It updates the Climate Change Act 2008 by introducing nitrogen trifluoride, which I will refer to as NF₃, as the seventh targeted greenhouse gas, and thereby brings it into scope for the UK’s carbon budgets. NF₃ is a synthetic gas that occurs naturally but not in the volumes we need. It is primarily used in the production of electronics such as solar panels and flat-screen TVs, but is considered a potent contributor to climate change and is estimated to be 16,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The order will rightly introduce new duties on the Secretary of State to report on these harmful emissions.

I assure the Committee that NF₃ emissions have been captured in the UK’s national greenhouse gas emissions statistics and international reporting to the United Nations framework convention on climate change since 2015. NF₃ is also within the scope of the UK’s nationally determined contributions under the Paris agreement. The order will ensure that the Climate Change Act and statutory reporting pursuant to the Act are aligned with our greenhouse gas inventories and international reporting practice, and that our domestic targets continue to align with the latest science.

The inclusion of NF₃ does not put our domestic targets at risk, as NF₃ emissions represented less than 0.0001%—I think that is a ten-thousandth of a per cent.—of total UK territorial emissions in 2020. Its inclusion in the carbon budgets does not make a material difference to the challenge of meeting them, and it can therefore be included without reviewing the levels of those legislative targets. That view is supported by the Climate Change Committee, for whose support and advice I am grateful.

Let me turn to the wider impacts of the order. The inclusion of NF₃ in the Act will require businesses to report on NF₃ emissions under the streamlined energy and carbon reporting framework. That is a reporting requirement for all quoted companies and large businesses. Due to the very low use of NF₃ in UK production, and because existing reporting methodologies such as the widely used greenhouse gas protocol only require NF₃ to be included in companies’ inventories, I can assure the Committee that the impact on business from the instrument coming into force will be minimal.

I thank all the devolved Governments for their support during the consultation on the order. I thank the Welsh Minister for Climate Change for bringing before the Senedd a statutory instrument consent memorandum stating that this order is the most practical legislative vehicle for the provision in question to apply to Wales.

The Government want to ensure that as we transition the economy to net zero, the Climate Change Act 2008 evolves with the necessary developments in science and our international commitments. It is therefore right that this harmful and extremely potent gas becomes part of our domestic targets and is reflected in our efforts to track progress against them. I commend the order to the Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake]

It is a pleasure to respond to the shadow Minister, whom I thank for his support. He is right that nitrogen trifluoride is a very potent gas, but it occurs in minuscule quantities. As I said in my opening remarks, we have been recording emissions internationally and it is right that we now do that domestically. We are learning more and more as we go.

On the shadow Minister’s point about how we eradicate the gas completely from processes, he will be familiar with the review of the F-gas regulation that was published last month. We intend to consult next year on proposals for change. That process will be used to assess how we can go even further, with a focus on what additional reductions can be made to help us to meet our obligations to meet net zero by 2050. The shadow Minister can be assured that that is the direction we are going in.

The Climate Change Act requires the Government to ensure that our emissions reporting meets the standards that are set internationally. I am proud that this Government are doing exactly that in bringing forward this legislation. I point out to the shadow Minister and others in the Committee that an international comparison of the efforts of different countries around the world to mitigate climate change is compiled by an organisation called Germanwatch; I am sure the shadow Minister is very familiar with it. It lists every single country in the world, and we are eighth in that list. According to that independent report, the only countries ahead of us are Denmark, Sweden, Chile, Morocco, India, Estonia and Norway. Every other country that the shadow Minister or anyone else in the Committee can name is following our lead in terms of our efforts to mitigate climate change. With that, I commend the draft order to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.