Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, pursuant to the Answer of 23 March 2021 to Question 169003 on the Committee on Climate Change, if he will provide details of the due diligence exercises he undertook on each of the Board Members of the Committee on Climate Change to ensure there is no conflict of interest; and when that process was last reviewed.

BEIS carries out thorough due diligence exercises on each new board member of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), prior to approving their appointment, to identify conflicts of interest so that they can be managed appropriately on appointment. As part of due diligence checks, Government considers anything in the public domain related to potential members’ conduct or professional capacity. This includes undertaking searches of previous public statements and social media, blogs or any other publicly available information. In some cases, it will not be appropriate to offer a role if the conflict is too great.

After appointment, all Committee members and staff are required to recognise and disclose activities that might give rise to actual or perceived conflicts of interest. The CCC has a formal policy process on conflicts of interest which is reviewed annually.

The CCC’s conflicts of interest policy, along with a register of interests for Committee members – both of which are annually updated – and the minutes of each Committee meeting are published in the Transparency section of the CCC’s website at: https://www.theccc.org.uk/about/transparency/.