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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, if his Department will publish the data it holds on the level of carbon emissions during the covid-19 lockdown.

The UK’s greenhouse gas emissions data are compiled and published according to international requirements. We will be publishing provisional estimates of 2020 emissions in March 2021 based on provisional energy use data, and final estimates of 2020 emissions in February 2022. The greenhouse gas emission statistics we publish are available from the following webpage: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/uk-greenhouse-gas-emissions-statistics.

The Department has however published data on energy use [link] during 2020 which shows for example that petrol and diesel sales in the seven weeks after 23 March 2020 were 39% the average levels of the prior eight weeks. The Committee on Climate Change’s 2020 Progress Report estimates that the UK’s daily CO2 emissions were around 30% lower than mean 2019 levels during the peak of the lockdown in April and May 2020 [link].