Climate Change Assembly UK: The Path to Net Zero

Matthew Pennycook Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

It is a real pleasure to respond on behalf of the Opposition to what has been an extremely interesting debate. I thank all Members who have contributed this afternoon, the members of the Climate Assembly for taking part in the process and, in particular, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) for securing the debate and for the focused and well-argued speech with which he opened it.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) and others made clear, we are in the midst of a climate and environment emergency. With the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere continuing to rise unabated, the issue is not whether we can stop climate change—the climate crisis is, after all, already upon us—but whether we are willing to do what is necessary to transition to a net zero world in the coming decades and thereby arrest runaway global heating.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) made clear, there is no solution to the climate crisis that does not confront the issue of carbon consumption, but even if viewed through the lens of production emissions, the UK is still not doing enough. Not only are we not on track for the net zero target that Parliament legislated for just over a year ago; we are not even on track for the less stringent one that preceded it. When it comes to the UK’s record on territorial emissions, there is much to be proud of, but progress to date is largely the result of having picked the low-hanging fruit, particularly in relation to the power sector. The decarbonisation involved—this is the key point—has only had a very limited impact on people. If we are going to get on track for net zero, we will have to make rapid progress in sectors such as transport and housing that are far more difficult to decarbonise and where the impact on people will be much more acute.

Faced with the sheer scale of the challenge, with all the disruption that the kind of systems change required entails, there are those who believe that we will somehow need to distance or even remove people from the decision-making process entirely. The Opposition take precisely the opposite view. The transition to a low-carbon economy is unavoidable, but the pace at which it happens in a democracy like ours and the extent to which it is orderly depends on the consent and, indeed, the active involvement of people and places—a point made by the hon. Members for Broadland (Jerome Mayhew) and for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne). Far from that greater involvement leading to inertia or paralysis, the final report of the UK Climate Assembly suggests that if people are provided with the facts, and if they are given responsibility and a real stake in the process, they are likely to support bold climate action.

I do not have time to do justice to the many recommendations set out in the report, and in any case, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West and others have done so in their remarks. I want to briefly step back and look at two of the fundamental principles that the overwhelming majority of Climate Assembly members felt should underpin the transition to net zero and that have been prominent themes in today’s debate: the need for strong leadership from Government and the need for fairness.

First, on the need for strong leadership, the Climate Assembly showed clear support for

“Leadership from government that is clear, proactive, accountable and consistent”

and leadership that allows for

“certainty, long-term planning and a phased transition.”

As things stand, the Government are not providing leadership of that kind. I have no doubt that the Minister will robustly refute that point. In truth, he knows as well as I do that the Government still do not accord emissions reduction the status that it warrants and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) pointed out, there is still not the kind of grip from the centre necessary to co-ordinate and drive progress on ambitious climate action across Government and ensure clarity, certainty and consistency of approach.

We have seen plenty of announcements from the Government in recent months, some more significant than others, and a 10-point package—I will not call it a plan, because there is still no sign of a comprehensive strategy for achieving net zero and no serious attempt to close the net zero investment gap that exists. We have seen policy making that is at times so wildly inconsistent with that target that the Chancellor sees no issue whatsoever with delivering a spending review in which, in one breath, he talks about investment in a greener future and, in the next, he celebrates Britain’s biggest ever investment in new roads. The Government must do better.

The second point, which in the long run is probably more important, is that the assembly’s final report stresses the need for fairness to be at the heart of the transition. Historically, our country has a terrible track record of managing industrial change in a fair way. The loss of jobs and the damage to communities in previous transitions, particularly the brutal deindustrialisation of the 1980s, makes people rightly suspicious of claims that this time it will be different. The transition to a low-carbon economy is a much greater challenge in many ways than deindustrialisation, affecting in different ways almost every industry and region of the UK. The challenge ahead is to ensure that green policy is designed effectively so we mitigate the inevitable disruptive change that comes with that transition, and to ensure that people and places are protected and supported through it and—as the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) and others have argued—that there are tangible benefits, particularly for those most affected and the nations and regions hosting infrastructure. For that to happen, I would argue that people and communities will need to be actively involved in the process. Community power and worker voice will have to be factored into an industrial strategy when we finally see one.

The gilets jaunes movement in France is only the most notable example of how badly designed green policy and a failure to embed fairness of process and outcome in the transition can erode the public support necessary for it, so we need to hear more from the Government about how fairness can be embedded in the net zero process, and we need action now to ensure that the benefits of the green transition are realised here at home. I have to say that that is something the Government, along with the SNP Scottish Government, have demonstrably failed to do in letting the BiFab engineering yards in Scotland go to the wall, putting at risk the UK’s supply chain for the deployment of offshore wind.

In conclusion, we very much welcome the Climate Assembly’s final report. While the deliberative process, such as the one used for it, is not a substitute for representative democracy, we believe that it can improve the way it works. In the Minister’s response, as well as addressing the various points made today by hon. Members, I very much hope that he will indicate that the Government also recognise the importance of actively involving the public in shaping the pathway to net zero, and that he will give the House a sense of what consideration, if any, his Department is giving to building deliberative processes into any forthcoming net zero strategy.