Lord Deben says rolling back key environmental policies will damage Britain's hopes of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Photo: David Rose
Rishi Sunak He is unconservative in abandoning Britain's net-zero emissions pledge, says Lord Deben, formerly one of the government's most senior climate advisers.
Three months after stepping down as chairman of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the Tory grandee has criticized the Prime Minister for rolling back key environmental policies.
He not only believes the decision will damage Britain's hopes of achieving net zero by 2050, but also fears it will harm business.
“The government has failed offshore wind, the car industry, just as it failed housing,” says a former Tory minister.
“I'm a conservative because I believe that free enterprise works and that you need to work with industry and the private sector to make this country richer and better so that you can help the poorest.
“Pursuing policies that actually undermine some of our largest industries does not seem to me to be conservative at all. They call me a rebel, but I am not a conservative rebel.
“I am a conservative. Now the government is turning against the Conservatives.»
UK progress towards net-zero energy target
Lord Deben's anger has been fueled by Sunak's net zero turnaround, but he also criticized the government's failed offshore wind auction earlier this month — when no firms submitted bids to build new wind farms.
He is also upset at the way the prime minister has undermined the CCC, the organization he led for almost 11 years.
Such criticism may shock some Tories, especially given Lord Deben's long and distinguished career in the party.
Lord Deben, the then John Gummer, was first elected to Parliament in 1970 as the MP for Lewisham West and became party chairman. Conservative Party from 1983 to 1985.
He was appointed Secretary of State for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in 1989 and then Secretary of State for the Environment in 1993.
In 2010 a peerage followed and he was appointed Chairman of the CCC two years later.
Lord Deben's biography
However, Lord Deben is not only a Conservative, but also an environmentalist.
His anger is directly linked to the Prime Minister's decision, announced in his speech, to delay the ban on petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035, and the impact this will have on UK emissions.
>< p>The announcement comes just weeks after Michael Gove, the Level Up Secretary, said the 2030 target was “unshakable”.
Lord Deben says such policy changes are disruptive trust in government.
<р>“These changes have made the industry extremely controversial because they have invested billions and it will make it difficult to generate adequate returns.
“That's why he received such an attack from the entire automobile industry. What business wants from government is ambition, certainty and consistency. This change reduced confidence, was inconsistent and was not ambitious enough.”
Sunak also relaxed deadlines that would have made it increasingly difficult and ultimately impossible to install new gas boilers in homes.
He said heat pumps, the main alternative to boilers, were expensive and inefficient for many homes.
The result, Lord Deben said, was a disaster for the UK's hopes of achieving net zero.
Heating homes in the UK generates around 68 million tonnes of CO2 a year – almost 20% of the country's total emissions – so rapid emissions reductions are essential to achieving net zero.
1807 Lagging Consumption
Regarding the government's recent offshore wind auction, which had no bidders, Lord Deben points the finger at former energy secretary Grant Shapps.
“Mr Grant Shapps was the reason for this,” he says. “He did not listen to everyone's advice regarding the minimum price he would have to set for the electricity that these wind farms would generate.
“Over the past year, prices for building materials have increased very sharply — up to a 40% increase in everything, from bricks to concrete. But Grant Shapps refused to accept this and set the price so low that they didn't receive any bids.»
As well as attacking the government, Lord Deben is also quick to defend the CCC after his recent departure.
The CCC is very much a Conservative creation, although it was created under the Climate Change Act in 2008 when the Labor government was in power.
The driving force behind the project was Peter Ainsworth, then a Tory shadow figure, who worked with Friends of the Earth and other pressure groups, first to draft the legislation and then to win cross-party support. < /p>
Ainsworth's work supported Lord Deben resulted in the legislation receiving a large cross-party majority, with only 5 MPs out of 646 voting against it.
She has maintained that support ever since, but Lord Deben is concerned that his own party now risks undermining one of its most important legacies.
“It was an act. invented by conservatives,” he says. «Ainsworth sold it out to every other political party while we were in opposition.
«The whole idea of the Climate Change Act was that Parliament would democratically vote on a long-term carbon budget every five years, so we vote yes future budgets are much earlier.
«The idea was to keep people and businesses safe — they know what's going to happen.»
He warns Sunak's speech last week risks breaking that commitment.
The CCC's need for a staunch political champion became apparent last week when the Prime Minister listed a series of radical proposals to cut emissions that he hinted were coming from the CCC.
0907 cost of pure zero
These included a meat tax, new air travel levies and an obligation for households to sort their waste into seven bins.
No one at the CCC had allegedly heard of such proposals. but he did little to protect himself. Lord Deben's temporary replacement will be Professor Piers Forster, a renowned scholar with little experience of the political machinations associated with the position.
“He's a brilliant man, but this job really needs someone who understands how Whitehall and Westminster work,” says Lord Deben.
“Nobody said such things. We can't find any suggestions for having seven containers, and certainly no suggestions for not eating meat. And the Climate Change Committee has never proposed taxing people's flights.”
What, then, makes Downing Street make such proposals? The obvious suspicion is that with by-elections in the Bedfordshire and Tatton heartlands coming up next month, Sunak is hoping to repeat his surprise victory in Uxbridge last July.
Then there was the battle over London's ultra-low emission zones, but next could be a dispute over the future of net-zero emissions.
Unsurprisingly, this puts Lord Deben in a difficult position. Yet for all his current frustration and anger, he insists his Conservative enthusiasm remains strong.
There's no doubt he'll be rooting for the Tories at the next election. But he will be a strong critic of any further weakening of the party's climate policy.
Свежие комментарии