Climate Change Act 2008 (International Aviation and International Shipping) Regulations 2026

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate. Like the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I very much welcome the regulations themselves; they have been a long time coming, but it is good that we are now including aviation and maritime within the sixth carbon budget. It is going to be challenging, and I certainly understand the need for flexibility in methodology. The Committee on Climate Change has set out some of the challenges we are going to face, but that we should do it I am absolutely convinced.

This debate follows last week’s rather dispiriting debate, when the Conservative Opposition essentially turned their back on net zero and on any concern about climate change. In criticising the Government last week, the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, said nothing about the impact of climate change and nothing about what they would do in relation to net zero.

The Commons debated last week’s and this week’s SIs together, and I read the debate. The shadow Energy Secretary, Claire Coutinho, made not one mention of what the Conservatives would do to mitigate or adapt to climate change. Instead, her sole response was to get rid of carbon tax and repeal the Climate Change Act—as noble Lords here will know, we were the first country to establish a long-term, legally binding framework. Are the Conservatives really serious about wanting to axe this landmark piece of legislation? In 2019, they beefed it up with commitments on net zero under the noble Baroness, Lady May, and the last Conservative Prime Minister stated that energy transition and net zero were among the greatest opportunities facing this country.

We come back to the issue of economic growth. I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, was absolutely right: the real catastrophe to prosperity and economic growth is climate change, not the actions we are taking to try to mitigate and adapt to them. Noble Lords will have read the CBI report that came out a couple of weeks ago, looking at the green economy. It is massive. It is one of the only sectors which is really growing in this country, and we can add aviation and maritime to that. We now have a £105 billion net zero sector and 1.1 million full-time equivalent jobs—and they are good-quality jobs as well.

The issue of other countries taking advantage of the UK taking leadership is absolute nonsense. There is huge advantage to the UK in being a key player in a net-zero economy. We know from the work of the International Energy Agency that actually, despite what some leaders say, many countries are speeding on with a transition to net zero. We need to be part of that, and aviation and maritime need to be part of that. So I very much support the statutory instrument. Tonight, we are seeing that, around the House, there is a strong consensus in favour of dealing with climate change and moving to net zero as fast as we can.