The prime minister’s decision to delay or drop certain mandatory commitments to lower carbon heat poses a significant setback to UK net zero policy. This was the warning from the current chief executive of the influential Climate Change Committee (CCC) watchdog that advises the government on policy.
Chris Stark told Parliament’s cross-party Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) that Rishi Sunak’s announcement in September that he would be rethinking some of his government’s main net zero policy commitments risked delaying the overall pace of the country’s green transition – particularly in homes.
The announcement touched on a range of commitments linked to the rollout of electric vehicles, as well as encouraging a move to lower carbon power and heat in buildings.
In terms of building commitments, the prime minister announced he would delay a ban on the installation of oil and LPG boilers by nine years until 2035. He also said that the government would no longer mandate that private landlords have to make energy efficiency improvements to rental properties over the current decade.
Mr Stark said that he believed that the changes in commitments to building plans would be among the most impactful among the reforms announced by Rishi Sunak in September in terms of overall decarbonisation progress.
He said: “They are probably the most consequential of the announcements in the prime minister’s speech overall.”
Mr Stark was speaking to the EAC about the committee’s latest views about the country’s progress towards meeting its legal target to become a net zero economy by 2050.
The committee were told by Mr Stark that he remained broadly positive about the current commitments and progress to transition to becoming a net zero economy.
However, the panel of MPs heard that the CCC held significant concerns about the ability to deliver on targets beyond 2030 on the path to full decarbonisation.
Mr Stark said he was heartened by the prime minister’s commitment to existing pledges, including work to ensure a 15 per cent reduction in energy demand from UK buildings by 2030. This reduction would be based around 2021 levels of energy use.
Mr Stark told the committee that it was important for more detail and policy about how the 15 per cent reduction target could now be met.
He said: “That 2030 target is very imminent now, we will struggle to meet that pledge. The prime minister has assured us we will meet it, but he didn’t give us the evidence with which we could join him in that assurance.”
Energy costs
Mr Stark said that another vital issue that could determine progress on encouraging heat pump nationally would be on delivering on commitments to rebalance tariffs and energy prices that would favour electricity over natural gas or oil heating.
He stated: “I would say the most important policy of all for achieving net zero, particularly over the next ten years, would be to make electricity cheaper than fossil fuels. If you could do that in a broad way, you would supercharge the move to heat pumps, for example, or to electric cars.”
Among some of the main priorities for the CCC over the coming years would be its analysis and advice to government on the UK’s Seventh Carbon Budget.
The proposals, which will set out the predicted future costs of efforts to transform UK infrastructure and buildings in line with the 2050 decarbonisation target, are expected to be published in 2025 during the next parliament.
Mr Stark told MPs on the EAC that he expected the budget to look in much more detail at cost distribution and the challenges in ensuring lower income households are able to afford and move to low carbon technologies at scale.
He said: “This is so we are not asking those that cannot afford heat pumps to make investments they will clearly be unable to make.”
The issue of affordability was identified as being a critical concern that could otherwise risk undermining overall national progress, particularly with the scale of concerns over living costs, said Mr Stark.
He said, “It wouldn’t be a very good strategy for achieving decarbonisation, because if you can’t afford your gas bill today, you’re unlikely to be going out shopping for a heat pump.”
“So there is clearly a role for policy here.”
The CCC said the Sixth Carbon Budget has begun to look across various sectors about the issue of affordability and distribution of funding for lower carbon heat. Much more work was expected to be undertaken by the CCC into affordability for its next set of recommendations that will be shared with the government and Parliament.
Mr Stark said: “I think in the next carbon budget our goal is to try and explore those income distribution questions in a much more detailed way. It’s quite exciting to get into that.”
This work was expected to look at some “difficult and controversial” aspects of policy and how best to incentivise end users and the HVAC market to be able to supply alternatives to natural gas and oil boilers. Mr Stark said this could involve looking at how some industries such as the transport sector may need to taxed or supply revenues for assisting other sectors to decarbonise their operations.
Any work and debates would need to better explain the benefits and values, from an economic and environmental standpoint, of improving access to low carbon technologies, the EAC was told.
Mr Stark said that the challenge of distributing funding more effectively, but in terms of regional and industry funding policy, would be important to ensure a more widespread benefit to society from moving to low carbon solutions.
He said: “It’s the benefit distribution more than anything right now that strikes me as being the greatest inequality. If you are rich enough to afford a heat pump and drive your Tesla – you can escape many of the charges that other that others in society cannot. That is for me the biggest of the policy challenges we face in net zero.”