Net Zero (Industry and Regulators Committee)

Lord Birt Excerpts

Friday 20th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, the on-the-button report that we are discussing today, and the more recent Skidmore review, with its 1,112 granular paragraphs and 129 detailed recommendations, well illuminate a true scandal. As a nation, we have declared a widely supported net-zero goal and then, in effect, walked off to the pub, leaving behind a black hole where detailed policy and a plan of implementation ought to be in place. The Government’s response to the committee is not that plan.

There are scores of challenging issues, many already mentioned, that remain unresolved. These include: creating a reliable, accessible EV charging network; decarbonising the heating of homes and buildings; incentivising insulation; reconfiguring the electricity grid to create greater capacity to deliver locally and to enable access for local generation and stored power; a major transformation identifying the precise mix of generating technologies, including nuclear, wind and solar and how to store that surplus power for intermittency; pinning down the as-yet unsettled economics of hydrogen and carbon capture and storage; taxing carbon more coherently; setting out a strategy for our extensive national gas network; and many more.

Valuable as it is to have the Skidmore review, it was an extraordinary act for the Government to commission it. Doing so was, in effect, an overt declaration that the Government were not wrestling with and resolving the host of unsettled issues that the Skidmore review identifies. Both reviews make similar recommendations, which we have heard echoed today, of what the Government now must do; namely, to create effective machinery in the Cabinet Office to co-ordinate policy-making and action across Whitehall and the country at large.

Short of running a war, net zero is the biggest issue that government will ever have to manage. I suggest that what is needed—again, echoing others to a degree—is a dedicated unit in the Cabinet Office with a professional project management team; the capacity to frame policy where more than one Whitehall department is involved; political leadership, I suggest from the Deputy Prime Minister chairing a committee of all relevant Ministers; critically, a Minister of State for net-zero delivery, with no other responsibilities; and, finally, formal annual reporting of progress towards net zero, what policy issues have been resolved and what are yet to be resolved—there will be many.

The Minister performs a heroic job in this House representing BEIS on these matters, but I hope that he will be able, in due course, to report to us that fit-for-purpose machinery will indeed be put in place—we have heard that plea from all sides of the House—to supercharge the whole of government to meet our existential net-zero goals.