Climate Change

Pippa Heylings Excerpts

Wednesday 24th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Pippa Heylings (South Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

I thank the Minister and the Government for allowing a good length of time for us to debate and give due consideration to this issue of national security, just as it demands. On the day that we are debating the draft Carbon Budget Order 2026, which aims to balance our carbon emissions from 2038 to 2041, it has just been confirmed that we have surpassed the UK’s record June temperatures, which were set in 1976. The record has been surpassed in Charlwood in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan). The Met Office has also issued a red warning for extreme heat this week, with temperatures likely to hit 40°C, but once again the UK is woefully unprepared because we keep putting our head in the sand.

Climate change is no longer a future threat; it is here with us today and the consequences are already being felt. The shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), asked about costs. This week alone, hundreds of schools have closed. GCSE and A-level students are taking what may be the most important exams in their lives in sweltering conditions, in schools unfit for the current temperatures. Public transport is gridlocked and trains are being cancelled today. Telecommunications are down and the economy faces hundreds of millions of pounds of lost productivity and infrastructure failures.

Turning to the public health costs, last summer’s heatwaves contributed to an estimated 16,500 avoidable excess deaths across Europe, with 1,504 heat-associated deaths last year in the UK alone. We know that that is affecting our elderly and the most vulnerable.

[Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) (Green)]

The hon. Member is making an important speech. She highlighted the record-breaking June temperatures, and I heard Members behind me talk about how it is lovely and warm, but she highlights the very real human cost and the number of deaths per year that we are already seeing. Did she hear the Climate Change Committee highlighting that on the current trajectory, if we do not take action by mid-century, we will see 10,000 unavoidable deaths per year due to heat? Does that not show how serious the situation is?

[Pippa Heylings]

Absolutely, I agree with the hon. Member.

Let us no longer hide from this, but look it clearly in the eye: there are clear costs. They are no longer in the future; they are here now. There are costs to our economy, but also to our communities.

Let us talk about food costs. Food supplies are coming under increasing pressure. Three of the UK’s worst harvests on record have occurred within the last five years, hitting our farmers and driving up costs for families at every shop. Floods and wildfires are making homes uninsurable and putting lives and livelihoods at risk. But this is much more than a story about a few hot days. If we think that this week’s heat is uncomfortable, the difficult truth is that what today feels exceptional will increasingly become normal, and without purposeful climate action, it will keep on getting worse.

[Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)]

The hon. Member is making an important speech. Climate change is one of those issues that my constituents contact me about all the time, particularly my young constituents. This is something that really bothers them as much as it does us. Does she agree that climate change is something we are experiencing now—we know that when we step outside? Does she also agree that a dead planet with plenty of jobs is no good for any of us, so we need to focus on this and deal with it?

[Pippa Heylings]

Like the hon. Member, I regularly meet young people across my constituency. I find it hard to look my children and children in my constituency and beyond in the eye, because that is one of the things they talk about the most. I challenge any MP in this Chamber to say that they do not receive those emails or have those meetings in schools where this issue is brought up. I feel that responsibility deeply, and I believe that that feeling is shared across the majority of those in this Chamber.

Without action, we risk handing our children and the next generation a Britain where extreme heat regularly keeps children out of classrooms. Did we not learn from covid, during which the more disadvantaged were left behind because they were told to go home? They did not have large homes, cool gardens or broadband, and that is happening yet again this week. We will have a Britain in which thousands die prematurely each summer and in which water scarcity, with a deficit of 5 billion litres a day of public water, is a reality. In my constituency of South Cambridgeshire, which is one of the most water-stressed in the country, this issue is affecting growth right now, so we know how critical it is.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

We should add that water shortages are a real cause of conflict. Many communities will be displaced. Anybody who is worried about migration now should be deeply worried about migration in the future, because people will simply be displaced—

[Wera Hobhouse]

They will come, and you will shut the borders, but we will have wars over water shortages. We absolutely will. It sounds alarmist, but we can do something about it. We should not put our heads in the sand. Does my hon. Friend agree?

[Pippa Heylings]

I thank my hon. Friend, as always, for her passionate defence and her knowledge on this issue. I worked for 20 years in east Africa, southern America and the Caribbean on UK climate policy, including under the previous Conservative Government. I saw countries already facing water shortages and what that meant: devastating crops and economies, and putting countries into recurrent economic recession. We must be committed to net zero emissions by 2050 because the science when the former Government agreed this—

[Claire Coutinho]

The hon. Member is making an emotional speech, and I understand she cares deeply about this issue. This target is imposing costs on our businesses in Britain, which is driving them away from one of the cleanest energy systems in the world. Our refineries now pay more on their carbon tax bill than they do on their wage bill. What does that mean? It means we are importing back those same goods from countries such as India that have higher emissions—twice the emissions, in fact. Why should we set a target more onerous than that in other countries, driving production away, only to import goods with higher emissions? What does she think that will do for climate change?

[Pippa Heylings]

Perhaps I would contest the fact that we cannot equate the emotion with a rational mind as well. These are science-based targets that the hon. Member’s Government agreed to set. What is recommended in the carbon budget order is set by the independent Climate Change Committee, with robust figures, and the science has shown us that this is our best chance to limit warming to under 2°. Global collective action avoided—at least for now—a 4° warmer world, and as I understand it, the Treasury has accepted modelling to show that we have accepted a 2° warmer world. It means that every Department will have to look at what a 2° warmer world means and how we adapt to that. I agree, however, that the impact on our industry, with some of the highest energy prices, means that it is less competitive. Let us therefore work together and focus directly on how we can get energy bills down.

The Liberal Democrats welcome the seventh carbon budget, and we are glad that the Government have accepted the advice of the robust and science-based Climate Change Committee, which puts us on a consistent and achievable pathway to meeting net zero while building a fairer and thriving new economy.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that we will never persuade other countries to take action to reduce their carbon emissions unless we show global leadership? Will she join me in congratulating the Prime Minister, who went to COP29 in Baku, announced an ambitious nationally determined contribution of reducing emissions by 81% by 2035? That was real climate leadership. Having been at that COP, I know that there was such disappointment among other countries about the fact that the previous Government had stepped away from showing that kind of leadership.

[Pippa Heylings]

I very much appreciated the work that the hon. Member did in her former role, and we were together at that COP meeting. Yes, I congratulate the Prime Minister, but I also congratulate former Prime Ministers. I was working internationally, and I worked on the macroeconomic budgets of developing countries, particularly the emerging economies, and we saw what they could do to follow the UK’s lead and leapfrog technologies in their economies. I absolutely agree with the hon. Member, which is why it is disappointing to hear from those on the Conservative Front Bench that they want to delay science-led targets and oppose environmental action, which would lead the world in a more insecure and uncertain place, and leave businesses without the certainty they need. I urge them to help us rebuild the consensus that we need. It can only smell of a desperate attempt at political opportunism to join Reform and gamble with the lives and livelihoods of future generations.

[Claire Coutinho]

If the evidence is so science-led, will the hon. Member explain why the Climate Change Committee was out by a factor of three—300%—on the cost of offshore wind, which is one of the key inputs for the target that she will be voting for today?

[Pippa Heylings]

I will look forward to seeing its answer when you send a letter back—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. When she sends a letter back.

[Pippa Heylings]

When a response to the letter comes back. Let us talk about the economics.

[Richard Tice]

It is an excellent idea to talk about the economics. The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) could not answer this simple question, but perhaps the hon. Lady can instead: when will the bills come down?

[Pippa Heylings]

The answer to that is in two ways. First, we must take gas out of the system as much as possible. Secondly, we must fix a broken electricity market. The way we charge customers and businesses right now is broken, and we need to change that. I do not believe in what happened under a previous Government, when George Osborne as Chancellor reduced taxation on oil and gas companies three times. By the end of that we had negative receipts to the Treasury, because we were also looking at decommissioning exemptions. Until some of the windfall tax profits came in, negative receipts were coming into the Treasury at that point.

If we talk about the economy, let us talk about the transition. As we have already heard, research from the CBI and the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit shows that the green economy is already contributing more than £100 billion and over 1 million new jobs. Clean power and decarbonisation are about growing our economy, creating those jobs, lowering energy bills and strengthening our energy security.

Although we welcome the carbon budget, setting targets is the easy part; delivering them is what counts. That is why we look forward to the Government’s delivery plan and seeing the steps that will be taken, because we worry that there is a risk they will fall short. The carbon budget will take much more than decarbonising our power supply and cannot be delivered in a centrist way from Whitehall alone. We Liberal Democrats want to see more action and ambition from this Government, not a focus on energy alone.

Emissions reductions will be experienced in people’s lives, and not just environmentally but economically, through changes in how homes are heated, how people travel and how energy is used. Local authorities, communities, farmers and businesses will be required to be partners in delivering change. We will have to double our efforts to restore nature, which is one of our most powerful tools for tackling climate change, by more generously supporting our farmers to accelerate tree planting and peatland restoration. But please, we should not treat nature protections as a blocker to economic growth. I ask the Government to get rid of the lazy, reckless rhetoric that divides climate and nature, rather than seeing them as indivisible necessities. We will also have to increase powers and funding for local authorities and communities to implement credible local climate and nature delivery plans.

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

My hon. Friend knows well about the issues of coastal erosion on the north Norfolk coast and the existential threat to communities such as Trimingham and Happisburgh. There is hard work being done by our local authorities and our Lib Dem councils through schemes such as Coastwise, and there is much more to do in the future, but does she agree with me that everything being done to protect those communities will be undermined by the worsening climate emergency, which has sped up erosion and will cause it to worsen further?

[Pippa Heylings]

I feel deeply about what my hon. Friend says. He is a well-known champion for rural and coastal communities that are facing such an insecure future, not knowing whether their homes will still be standing and whether they will be insurable. That is definitely something we need to look at.

Most importantly for this carbon budget, as we have heard from Members across the Chamber, electrification across key sectors is the key to rapidly reducing emissions and helping households to cut bills. Today, the Climate Change Committee has warned that progress in electrification has slowed, with heat pump installations up just 7% this year compared with 56% the year before. What is more, the share of electricity in industrial energy use fell last year, so we must see greater acceleration of electrification.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

On seeing a new development recently, I was dismayed that the developer said they were not putting in heat pumps because the cost of electricity meant that people would rather have gas boilers. Does my hon. Friend agree that if we removed the renewables obligation levy from electricity, so that we were fairly pricing electricity—currently, electricity is unfairly disadvantaged—we would incentivise far more heat pump installations?

[Pippa Heylings]

My hon. Friend often brings that issue up in the Chamber and in the Select Committee. We have to fix the broken system whereby households and businesses do not feel the benefits of cheaper renewable energy from solar and wind.

Finally, the Liberal Democrats believe that building public confidence in the transition to net zero requires people to see the benefits in their own communities. That means empowering those best placed to deliver change on the ground. Local authorities, community organisations and local leaders understand the needs of their areas, can bring people with them and are uniquely placed to turn national ambition into practical action. We need regulatory change so that community energy projects can sell energy locally, but those bodies can also take action on better public transport, warmer homes, nature restoration or street-by-street electrification.

Too often local climate action remains fragmented, underpowered and dependent on short-term funding. Critically, local authorities still have no statutory responsibility for delivering net zero for climate and nature duty. Such responsibility has been voted down every single time it has been introduced in devolution legislation. Will the Minister look at placing local authorities at the centre of delivery of the seventh carbon budget by legislating for a clear climate and nature statutory duty for local authorities, and by ensuring that they have the funding and powers needed to unlock these opportunities? Many Liberal Democrat Members have been local councillors and we know that local authorities can do that, together with local people. Climate change will not wait and neither should we—the time is now.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

With an immediate five-minute time limit, I call Olivia Blake.

--- Later in debate ---

[Harriet Cross (Gordon and Buchan) (Con)]

I will use my time to draw attention to parts of the impact assessment, because we are, after all, debating the carbon budget.

First, this budget allows for 37% of our energy consumption by 2040 still to come from oil and gas. The Climate Change Committee itself is allowing for oil and gas to be included in our energy mix into the years to come. On that basis, why are the Government still committed to banning new licences in the North sea? Why are they still committed to the energy profits levy? Why are they still stopping the permitting of Rosebank and Jackdaw? All that will do is increase our imports of more carbon-intensive oil and gas, which is not good for the climate, economy or jobs in the UK. That point can also be found in the impact assessment.

Secondly, reaching the carbon budget will require an “electrification of industry”. That means a reduction in our industrial capacity. The electrification of steel means a move away from blast furnaces, which will mean we lose our virgin steel capacity. Virgin steel is used for other industries as well, such as defence and civil nuclear, so we are going to hinder our civil nuclear capacity by reducing our virgin steel capacity.

Thirdly, the impact assessment—I hope Members have read it, but I am not so sure—says that

“a faster transition to renewables will not eliminate global supply chain risks.”

It is not true, no matter how often it is said, that reducing our reliance on oil and gas and upscaling renewables makes us less vulnerable to global pressures. It does not. This impact assessment says it does not. We must recognise that everything has a cost and a risk, including renewables.

I will bring my remarks to an end shortly, because I do not want to speak for too long. We must be realistic and pragmatic. As my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking) pointed out, this carbon budget assumes that we will reduce our meat and dairy consumption by 25%. It assumes that we will put a cost on households of thousands of pounds, which far exceeds any £300 saving on energy bills, were this Government to achieve it.

China is not putting these costs on businesses or households, and it is not closing down its domestic industries. China is opening 50 to 70 GW of new coal every year. It has almost 1,200 coal-fired power stations, which it is using to export its renewables technology to us—it does not make sense. China is responsible for over a third of global emissions, and we are responsible for 1%. We are not making a difference to global climate change by impoverishing our businesses, industries and households. We said that we wanted to lead, but there is no point in leading if nobody is following. The key players are not following.

[Pippa Heylings]

Can the hon. Lady confirm by when China said it will meet its net zero commitment?

[Harriet Cross]

I am sure the hon. Lady has a gotcha for me on that one. I believe it has either not set a target or it is 20 years, but I could not tell her which.