23
Examination of witness
The Rt Hon the Lord Deben.
Q1 The Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this one-off session of the Environment and Climate Change Committee with the former chair of the Climate Change Committee, Lord Deben. We are delighted that you are here with us. We look forward to exploring a number of issues around the institutions that govern our net-zero ambitions, the policies and record of this Government and where we need to go to achieve the goals they have set.
This is a public session. It will be recorded and will be available on parliamentlive. If any members have any interests to declare, please do so before you ask any questions. A transcript will be taken and witnesses will be able to comment on that in advance of publication.
Without further ado, John, you were in post for 11 years, which is something of a record among public bodies and indicates that a series of Governments thought you were doing a superb job. I thought we would start by asking for some reflections. From when the Climate Change Committee was set up to where we are now, you will have seen how the relationship between it and the Government has emerged, in the changes to its role and the nature of the advice it gives. Do you have any reflections on whether the roles of the CCC, and the relationship between it and the Government, are in the right place for where we need to be now?
Lord Deben: Thank you. First, we should remind ourselves that it is a parliamentary committee; we advise Parliament and the advice to the Government is through that. We are available to advise the Opposition as much as the Government. Indeed, I have had some very clear views about what the Opposition should do in various ways and have always been available for that. That is important, because it is a unique position for a committee to be in. It is not a departmental government committee.
The structure is remarkably good. It has been remarkably resilient through all the years since its inception because its independence is guaranteed. It gives its advice to Parliament. When Parliament passes the budgets, which we have to produce, they become law and cannot be changed without reference to the Climate Change Committee, which would have to give permission were it to be changed. That is the crucial bit of this. We cannot put off decision-making because there is an inconvenient by-election or general election.
The timing in the Act is remarkable. Every June, we have to report on how far the Government have met their statutory responsibilities and the advice we have given them, and we cannot put it off. The committee is properly caught in having to do that and the Government cannot ask us to put it off. The Government then have to respond in October. This is earnest of the very clear way in which the whole structure has taken place.
I would not make any serious alteration to it, except one. This is not because it has ever gone wrong, but the one way in which you could still the voice of the Climate Change Committee would be not to give it any money. I have always thought that the one thing we should have done was to make it paid for, like the very important Auditor-General, with an independent provision. I have no complaint of any Government. Of course, we are pressed to be as lean as we can and I think we are. However, it was a pity that we did not do that one thing. Certainly, we have advised many countries now—I think 14 or 15—which have followed us on that.
The interesting thing is that we are still the most independent of any of the climate change committees around the world. It is interesting to see that we have been prepared in Britain to respect the fundamental issue. The democratic demand is that you have regular refreshment of the democratic mandate, whereas the climate change demand is that you have a continuing and absolutely determined battle to be fought. That is why this mix is so remarkable. Democracy is served because Parliament has to agree, or not agree, to the budgets. The long-term needs are reflected by the fact that there can be no change without either repealing the Act or the Climate Change Committee agreeing.
I can imagine circumstances in which the Climate Change Committee would feel it right to agree but I have not yet come to one of those. There have been odd occasions on which I have had to remind the Government that, if they tried to do these things without our agreement, they would find that somebody would take them to court and I would be the first witness for the prosecution—that would be embarrassing for both of us, so I asked that we please not get into that position.
Q2 Baroness Boycott: It is great that you have that degree of independence. What difference does it make as to who is the occupant of No. 10, picking up on what Zac Goldsmith said in his letter and the fact that today there has been a leak about the withdrawal of the contribution to the global finance fund? I declare my interest as vice-chair of Peers for the Planet. We had a meeting the other day on how one ramps things up. The prevailing opinion at the end of the meeting was that you had to have a Prime Minister who was seriously engaged in this issue so that it gets across departments. What is your outgoing view on that, as you have served a number of Prime Ministers in your time?
Lord Deben: I am rather against getting into personalities and have never done so as chair of the Climate Change Committee. I much prefer to talk about Governments. I can think of some Governments where the Prime Minister has not been all that engaged but the Government have, and you can have it the other way round. I much prefer to concentrate on the fact that, whereas last year we were doubtful about the Government having a plan to reach net zero, the courts then, because of the Climate Change Act, forced the Government to produce 3,000 pages explaining how they were going to get there.
When we read the 3,000 pages—we were not given them beforehand, so we had to do it afterwards; I refused to make any comment because I do not comment unless I know—we spent a lot of time looking at it. We have had the best people in the world looking at it and we have come to the conclusion that, having explained what they intend to do, the Government are even less likely to reach the legal commitment. That is why we were so strong on it.
I do not think it is for the Climate Change Committee to tell the Government what mechanisms to use. We can recommend mechanisms and courses of action, and we can say which actions are absolutely necessary. However, if you are to keep the balance between us setting the budgets and targets, helping people to go on the right route and Parliament to make its decisions on individual matters, I think it is much better to keep to that division, which is why I have always fought against mission creep.
A good example of that is airports. We have made it clear that there is an envelope for the aviation industry’s emissions outside of which it cannot go. It is not for us to say, “You can expand Bristol but retreat Manchester”. That is not for us to say. However, it is for us to say to the Government: “You cannot allow the total to go beyond a certain point”. We are able to say that the Government have to have an airports policy, otherwise every airport will want to expand and they all think they can on the basis that some other airport will not. That is not a matter for us. That is a matter for the Government and I am keen on doing that.
That is why I have never commented on the Prime Minister in any circumstances, or the Leader of the Opposition. I very often have to say that I would like a bit more clarity about what the Opposition want to do. I would like to know it much more clearly because that is more likely to get the Government to do what they ought to do. That is why I welcomed the statement on oil and was sad that we had not had it up until then because I thought it made the Opposition unable to do what they ought to do, which is keep the Government’s feet to the fire.
Q3 Lord Duncan of Springbank: I want to take you back to 2015 in Paris when there seemed to be great optimism and hope. The world had come together and agreed, rather unexpectedly, to adopt what were quite far-reaching, ambitious targets. Has the mood music changed since then? I do not want you to comment on individuals, of course, but I am aware that across the channel some of the continental parties are becoming much more alert to the cost of living rather than the net-zero question and the same issues are coming through in the democracies of the West. Are you perhaps less optimistic now than you would have been in the aftermath of Paris when people were dancing on the tables?
Lord Deben: No, I am not less optimistic, because against what you have just said, one has to balance the fact that the United States is now fully engaged, the European Union has a much better green plan than it had then, China has just made a series of commitments of a kind that we never thought it would and we have an Australian Government who at long last have seen that climate change is happening and are doing things about it. The New Zealand Prime Minister was over here recently and I had a meeting with him. He puts climate change at the top of his list of things to do. I think that things have improved enormously around the world.
That is one of the reasons why we pointed out in our report not only that the Government would not reach the point that they have committed themselves to, legally and internationally, but that they are also enabling the United Kingdom to fall behind. Instead of being the leader, we are now behind. The trouble with that is that it is financially and economically very damaging for our business world because people will be investing elsewhere. It is rather like when you talk about onshore wind. Why on earth are the Conservative Government making it impossible for people who want to have an onshore wind turbine to have one, because generally they should not have them? Unless we make the change pretty quickly, the turbines for what we need will not be available.
We have to recognise that there is now competition of a kind that we did not believe possible at the time of Paris, and we have led that. That was our great achievement at Glasgow—to lead that much further. That is why we are disappointed that we have not built on that and have not, for example, had an expansion of onshore and offshore wind and photovoltaics. I can never understand this because, if you want to fight the cost of living crisis, surely we ought to be producing more and more energy in the cheapest way possible rather than wittering on about expensive ways to produce and generate electricity.
Lord Duncan of Springbank: I should have declared that I am the president of the Association for Decentralised Energy. I will be hosting the association’s lunch in a few minutes and will have to leave early, so please forgive me.
Q4 Lord Grantchester: The machinery of government has recently been reset and your committee has been critical that co-ordination across government departments has been disappointing. I have always thought that adaptation has been the poor relation, if you understand my meaning, in the issues that government has needed to face up to. Is it meaningful or critical that adaptation has been split off and made the responsibility of Defra rather than BEIS, a department that you have been most critical of? Furthermore, it is even less clear to me why responsibility for the UK ETS has also been made one of Defra’s responsibilities. Has this split of responsibilities for climate change been counterproductive?
Lord Deben: It has lasted for a long time. It is not the result of this recent reorganisation. Defra has always been responsible for adaptation. Adaptation has been dealt with differently in the Climate Change Act. First, there is a statutory adaptation committee of which there is a separate chair, who now cannot sit on the main committee because of her outside interests. She does not sit on the main committee but they have representatives and we interact with them. We now operate the two together because you cannot deal with either without dealing with the other, so we operate very closely. It is useful to have an adaptation committee that has a wider membership than the main committee.
I am afraid that Defra does not have a proper programme to reach net zero by 2050. This is remarkable given its role and somewhat surprising, but we have had a rather curious relationship with this department for a long time. We have had Ministers who did not believe in climate change. I found it rather difficult to deal with them, but we had that situation. I declare an interest in the sense that the present Secretary of State is my successor as the Member of Parliament for Suffolk Coastal. She has put a degree of organisation into the department, which I had not seen before so that is a great advantage.
The truth is that adaptation is not treated as seriously as mitigation, partly because of the way the Climate Change Act has been written. There is no role for us to say what the targets should be. There is no statutory position in that sense. Every five years the Government have to produce an adaptation report and we are expecting one now. We are way behind on it and I think the Government have to be very careful about this. We worry about people’s concern about climate change; it is growing all the time because people are feeling it. The witheringly hot summer last year made a huge difference. You cannot avoid that. We have now had the hottest June in history and that was true of 74 countries. We have now had the hottest day in history. These are very serious things, and they have a real effect upon the public; if you have a flood somewhere, people tend to forget it if it was not their flood, but if everyone experiences this very hot weather, they know that people have been very much damaged by it and then begin to find that drought is a real issue.
Just beyond where I live in Suffolk, Essex & Suffolk Water has said that it can make no new commercial connections until 2032. That has a direct effect on the economy of this country. We are in that difficulty all over the south-east, but in particular in the east. We are now officially designated as a semi-arid area. There is an article in the Daily Telegraph, which I have not read because I do not subscribe to it, but I read the first three sentences about drought and who is responsible. Clearly, the Government are responsible. We have known that we will have this for years and years, and yet we have not built the necessary infrastructure.
We have not helped people to use less water. We have done nothing to rebalance the water payments so that you can pay very little for family needs but much more for other additional needs. We have done none of those things and as a result we will have real trouble. I do not know whether South East Water is an efficient company or not. All I know is that there are people in its area who have not been able to get drinking water. This is in June—we have months to come.
Your point is very real but I do not think it is a departmental point. I think it is just the fact that the Government have not created the circumstances in which we take adaptation seriously. They ought to be very worried about it because this is where people will really complain. If you do not get your own water—if the floods come down your street because people have not planted trees in the higher land to stop the flooding—the Government will be blamed very directly.
Lord Grantchester: You are saying it is more an issue of budgets and priorities.
Lord Deben: You have to look at the budgets in that sense. The Government have been very sensible about funding for future flood events but they have not been sensible about the improvement and repair of the present flood defences. We have this rather curious position that we will be building serious new defences but some of the old ones are in significant danger of breaking under the weight.
Q5 Lord Whitty: For someone who was very sceptical when you were first appointed, I was rapidly converted to the feeling that you were doing a great job and have done so for 11 years. A lot of us who were doubtful to start with have been deeply impressed, so well done.
Lord Deben: Thank you.
Lord Whitty: You say that you are still an optimist but the last report of the committee, which you must have signed off, expressed quite explicitly that it no longer had so much confidence in the Government meeting the targets. You agree with the targets and you praised the Government for setting them. They give us a framework, but the committee says that confidence in meeting them has fallen. You particularly pick out, for example, home insulation and home heating, which this committee has looked at, and also behaviour change. How confident are you really that we can meet the targets?
Lord Deben: There is a sentence that I am very keen on reminding you of, which says that it is not too late for the Government to put it right. It is not too late, but they must not wait until the next general election. They have to do it now. This is why I feel very strongly about the delayers who are sometimes deniers and sometimes just would like to put things off. The trouble with the delayers is that they make everything more expensive and more touch and go. Any sensible business would have started much earlier and done it much more effectively.
I keep on realising that what I am saying—and this may hurt you, Lord Whitty—are sensible conservative views. If you have a problem, first you define it, then you measure it, then you recognise it and then you set in process a mechanism for solving it. You do not say, “It is all very difficult and, my goodness me, it is going to be very expensive”. The alternative of not dealing with it is much more expensive. While I am confident that climate change will force people to do the right thing, the trouble is that, by the time it does so, it will be much more expensive and much more touch and go. When I meet individual businessmen and suchlike all the time and they tell me what they are doing in the business and the rest of it, I always end by saying “What are you personally doing, because it is to you that your children will say, ‘What did you do to stop this world being in the disastrous position in which it was?’”
I am very determined to bring home to all of us that we all have an individual issue as well as a corporate one, but I believe that we will do it. It will be a last-minute thing. Mrs Thatcher used to say that we are an 11th-hour nation and an 11th-hour world, but she was absolutely right in her understanding that we had to deal with it.
Lord Whitty: Doing it at the last minute is more expensive and more difficult and the shape of the curve is important. You rightly said earlier that it was not that important that Britain was being caught up by other nations and that must be right. It is very important that the United States and other countries have taken a new view. Where Britain stands in the league table is not important, but are you worried that the world is falling behind in its commitments and its actual policies to meet that?
Lord Deben: I think it does matter where Britain is, because Britain has led the world and many of the changes in the world have happened because we set an example. Therefore, to cease to set an example is, in my view, a great disappointment. I know some people here do not agree, but leaving the European Union was a dereliction of duty because it means that we no longer have the influence that we once we had. I think that is morally wrong. Our duty on this earth is to use our influence and gain influence rather than back out of it. We have put ourselves into a less powerful position, but we showed at Glasgow that we could still lead the world in those circumstances and that is what we should be doing.
It is important, but you are quite right that we cannot do it all on our own. I have more confidence today when you look at what the Americans have done and what the European Union, China and South Korea are doing. You go around the world and you see places where it really has changed. In most of those cases, it has changed because climate change is clearly happening. The Chinese are in real trouble; they know it and have therefore taken steps that they might otherwise not have taken. In that sense I am optimistic, but I want us to do it sensibly and in a businesslike manner, because it is not only cheaper but it is what we need for our future. We will not have an economy unless it is a new economy based on green issues, because people will not buy our goods unless we do that. That is the first thing.
Secondly, if we want to fight the cost of living crisis, having cheaper energy is surely essential. Having houses that do not need so much energy, that are warm and comfortable and are not killing people in the summer, is surely what you need, because of the cost of living. If you are worried about energy security, surely you need more of your own wind, sun and light rather than relying on others. I do not see why people do not see that as the package that we are supposed to be dealing with. Even if you do not like climate change, even if you wish it would go away, these are the things that we should be doing as a nation.
Q6 Lord Bruce of Bennachie: I campaigned for renewable energy 40 years ago. I supported the parliamentary move to impose targets against the will of the Government of the day. I absolutely accept that climate change is real and I agree with your nine key messages, but I do have a problem.
Lord Deben: There is going to be a “but”.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie: There is a “but”. You have just asked why we would not use our own resources, but you were quite specific about the resources you want to use and the resources you do not want to use. Every scenario you can project to achieve net zero, even net zero itself, involves a declining amount of fossil fuels, but you said that licensing fossil fuels from now on is wrong. I want to know how we will fill that gap if we abandon our own sources of fossil fuels.
I will give you a couple of figures that have come out this week. Last year, the oil and gas industry in the UK generated £28 billion for the economy and 215,000 jobs, and we imported £117 billion of oil and gas. It is a declining industry and declining supply, as everybody knows. New licences are not to increase it, which is why I agree with you that “Expansion of fossil fuel production is not in line with net zero”, but it is not about expanding. It is about slowing the decline to match the transition.
The final point—I am sorry to say this—is that the industry, especially the supply chain, is increasingly investing in alternative renewable green energies. They will not be able to do it if they are rapidly shut down. Why cannot we manage that transition, as you put it, in a common-sense, conservative way?
Lord Deben: First, we could have a discussion about how much oil we will need and how much the industry is producing, but that would take a long time and we would be swapping figures. I do not want to have the argument on that basis, although I do not agree that we need it in the way that you say, but I will leave that aside. The Climate Change Committee rightly said in response to Putin’s invasion and the Ukraine war that it was perfectly proper for the Government to seek to get as much gas, particularly from our resources. I am talking about the idea of oil in 10 years’ time. In 10 years’ time, we will either have failed entirely to do anything about climate change, which I do not believe will have happened, or the world will be on a trajectory of declining use of oil. We will be able to buy oil from all sorts of people who are already producing it.
How do you tell countries in Africa that they should not start using new oil resources if you are starting to use new oil resources yourself? You can excuse that by saying that it is British, but it is still the same price and it is still sold on the world market, unless you nationalise it. My view is that, if you are trying to lead the world, you ought to listen to the International Energy Agency and its absolutely clear advice that we cannot go on increasing the sources of oil.
Britain should be the country that says this because we are in the ideal position to do so. We have resources, we know how much we are going to need in the 2030s—that is why I do not want to get into the argument; if you were right, there would be a different argument—and we are going to have a wide range of people to buy from. People then say, “We do not want to rely upon regimes we do not like”. We have relied on regimes that we do not like for the last 100 years. Also, there is a wide range of regimes that we do not like, so we will certainly be able to buy it.
The difference between us, Lord Bruce, is very simple. I do not believe that we will need those energy additions. I do not think we should be led astray into the old business of oil. We should be using our efforts and money to do what we have not done: to expand our renewables to find the new jobs there and make it possible for as much of that as possible to go to the areas now reliant on oil.
The last thing is this. We said that, if we bring more gas or oil out, we should do it in the most environmentally efficient way. We are not. Other countries, particularly Norway, are doing it more efficiently. Our oil and gas industry has refused to do what we asked it to do. Until it is prepared to do that minimum thing—produce our oil and gas in the most environmentally friendly way—I find it very difficult to take seriously the figures and the arguments it puts forward. I have had this direct argument with the chairman of one of the major companies and I have to say that I did not find the response anything like what I had hoped for.
The industry has to teach people that it really believes in proper movement from where it is to where it has to be. I have been a real campaigner against disinvestment because these industries have to change and that costs money. However, recent statements by Shell and BP make it very difficult for people to continue investment when they seem to be rowing back on that very point. We have a role in the world and we have made a huge difference. This is something we could have done but did not.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie: I have two points. First, we have the biggest balance of payments deficit in our history and you are saying we should actually increase that by importing instead of producing our own. Economically, I feel that you were keen about the domestic economy—
Lord Deben: Not if we are going to import less.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie: But it is billions of pounds and a declining industry anyway, and we are going to import more regardless.
Secondly, you mentioned Norway. Norway has made it absolutely clear that throughout transition it will produce every commercial litre in oil and gas in its sector. I do not have any vested interest but, living as I do in the north-east of Scotland and having represented it and known it for over 50 years, people there who delivered a huge amount for the country over 50 years are seeing people like you saying, “Your jobs are going to end and fast”. The investment is already leaving; 90% of the operators have now said they are taking their investment out of the country. Redundancies are happening today and what you are saying is not being very well received.
You said you advised the Leader of the Opposition. I can advise you that the former Lord Provost and leader of Aberdeen City Council, a Labour councillor and a Labour member of 35 years standing, and sitting councillor, resigned from the Labour Party in protest because he said it does not understand that transition requires the industry to have an orderly transition, not a rapid shutdown, which is what limiting licences would deliver.
Lord Deben: I do not believe that is what limiting the licensing means. I remind you what Lord Whitty kindly said about me. I will not change my mind on the facts because you tell me that some people do not like it. My job is to say what I believe to be right. We will not save the world from its destruction unless we set an example. That means we cannot allow further development of oil. You cannot ask other people to do it and say, “But we are going to increase it because it is good for our balance of payments”.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie: We are not increasing it; it is declining.
Lord Deben: They would say the same thing. The fact is we will increase it over what it would be if we allowed the decline to be at that speed. It is not fair for you to say that this is a rapid decline—it is not. The decline we saw was measurable against the needs that we have. We need to make these changes immediately. The real issue for you, Lord Bruce, is that you should say to the Government that they have to make this move easier for people by ensuring that there are jobs in the places you are talking about and that they are not thinking this through. It is the complaint you would have against Mrs Thatcher, who made the right decisions about declining industries but did not make the right decisions about what should be put in their place. We have to learn from that.
The Chair: Malcolm, it is not the place of Select Committee members to offer advice to witnesses. I remind all members that our job is to give advice to the Government.
Q7 Lord Lilley: To follow on from what Malcolm was saying, the sensible way to reach net zero is to phase out demand for fossil fuels. That is what you are statutorily obliged to advise on. It is not about restricting the supply of fossil fuels. There is no duty on you to advise on that or a legal obligation to do so. If oil companies choose to produce more oil than is needed because of the declining supply, they will lose money. That is their problem and it need not worry us.
If we stop them producing oil, which would be a bizarre thing to do when we are allowing ourselves to import it from other countries, other people will replace that supply at home and abroad. More importantly, if the whole world were to reduce the supply of oil and gas faster than we reduce demand, there will be shortages, price rises and huge profits for the oil industry. We will have done to ourselves what Putin did to us last year. Is that the logic of what you propose?
Lord Deben: No, that is not the logic and I did not say that. First of all, I have—
Lord Lilley: You only want us to stop—
Lord Deben: I will, if I may, explain yet again what I said. The world is producing oil sufficient to meet our needs. Our needs will increasingly decline. There are many countries in the world that will still be producing oil and have no intention of reducing that. There are other countries that could produce oil and gas and have to make a choice between going down that route and going down the route of renewables. We have a duty to try to get them to make the right decision because otherwise we will destroy our world and ourselves.
You are quite right that we should be, above all things, reducing our need for fossil fuels, but you personally have not helped us on that. On every issue that we have raised, you have tried to hold it up. It is no good using this excuse as a means of saying what you really mean—that you do not believe that climate change is threatening the world. You are, therefore, willing to be a delayer.
We have to get other countries to do the right thing because it affects our world. It is our lives; it is the future of our children. If you say to a country that does not have oil, “You have a chance to produce oil and your future will be with oil”, I am afraid it will not go for renewables, even though that is the real answer. We have to do two things. We have to help them go to renewables and cut out the in-between dirty thing. We have to set an example of that. All we need to do is say that we will have what is really a gentle decline in what we are producing; we will go on with that and the problems with our balance of payments will decline. However, we will not turbocharge the increase in oil and gas production, particularly oil.
Q8 Baroness Bray of Coln: I am a bit concerned by the slightly negative tone that you take on some of these things. The public need to be a bit more encouraged by some more positive news about how we are doing, so they feel that they are contributing to something that is working. I draw your attention to a report—I do not know whether you saw it—from the end of the year by the Times environment editor, Adam Vaughan. It was a splendidly positive look at where we are on all matters environmental. It is called “Six Reasons to be Positive”. Did you see that piece?
Lord Deben: I read it.
Baroness Bray of Coln: I was very struck by two things. First, it shows that the UK is doing rather well at reducing its emissions faster than most other rich countries. I think the most interesting fact it showed was a graph produced by the Global Carbon Project showing that we have in this country reduced our emissions to around the 1857 level, which is fantastically impressive.
My friend Rosie suggested that it might be that we are sending our steel to be manufactured in other places, which is a slightly cynical way of getting to where we want to be. I do not know about that, but it seemed to me that that is all good news. Why do we not hear more about the good stories? Frankly, if we continue to bombard people and berate them because they are not doing enough or they might have harboured the wrong ideas, we switch them off in the end. I think we want to try to be a bit more encouraging and talk about good success stories in the UK even when we are doing rather better than our former membership partners in the EU on some of this stuff. Why do we not continue to say that if it happens to be the truth?
Lord Deben: I am saying it all the time but this is a past thing. We have done that in the brilliant change to renewable energy. The hero of that was George Osborne; if he had not done what he did about offshore wind, we would not be there. It is a huge success. The issue is that we are now flatlining.
Baroness Bray of Coln: That is since the end of the year, because this report came out towards the end of the year.
Lord Deben: If you look at where the figures come from, the work was all done in the past. We are told, as a committee, not to look back but to look forward as to what the present policies will deliver. I am all for being as optimistic as possible; I was criticised by Lord Duncan and others for being too optimistic. I am totally optimistic and I constantly use these examples. The problem is that this Government at this time are not doing the things to keep that movement going. I entirely agree with his explanation and statement; we ought to say it all the time, and I do. If you come to any of my meetings, you will hear me say first of all how well we have done.
The problem is—and he does not cover this—that the things that we have been successful on have not included and asked things of the public. They are things that have been done administratively and effectively. The issue is that you have to help the public see that we are not trying to have a miserable world. I am not a member of Greenpeace; I am not a puritan; I do not want us to be colder and I do not want us to travel less. I want us to recognise that we are building a greener, cleaner and kinder world by doing what we are doing.
One thing that he has missed out, for example, is the appalling effect that we have had on biodiversity. We have lost more biodiversity in this country than any other country in the world. That has a real effect on climate change, and you can see it yourself. When you drove 20 years ago—you were very young—you would finish your journey and have to clean your windscreen because of the insects. You do not have to do that now because those insects are not there. That is an example of what we have done. Our soils are less productive today than they have ever been. We have done terrible things.
May I recommend something that you will find very surprising? It is very short, 60 pages, and called Laudato Si’. It is the Pope’s statement about this. It is worth reading, whatever religion you have, because it shows very clearly the interconnection between climate change—the symptom of what we have done to the world—and what we have done to the world. My problem is all the time to keep this balance between being very optimistic about what we have done and what we can do and serious about where we are.
When we write this report—Lord Lilley reminded me of this statutory requirement—our requirement is to measure where the Government are, not where they were. That is what we must do. Inevitably, it will point to those things, among others, that are good. For example, we have done much better on electric vehicles than either the Government or we thought would happen; it is going much better. We have done much worse on connections. Some councils have been appalling—you cannot have an electric car in some councils because they do not have any public plugs available. We must think about the way in which we, for example, benefit the rich and not the poor. If you have a drive, you can have your own plug; if you do not have one then you must rely on public plugs. We charge them VAT to use that, but they do not charge me VAT in my drive. These are things that I have to say. It is not because I am not optimistic.
Baroness Bray of Coln: It is the tone, sometimes.
Lord Deben: I think if you reread the report bearing in mind what we have just said, you will find the tone reflects the fact that they can do it if they would only get on with it. All Governments in any circumstances are much better at policy than they are at delivery. This is the nature of government. Sometimes I have to remind people that it is not about climate change. It is just about Governments. They find it very difficult to deliver.
Q9 The Chair: Can you say a bit more about the issue you just touched on? We have done well in the past with things that have not impacted on individuals, but as we move to where we are now, we must engage far more with individuals and the choices they make. In our behaviour change report, we worked from the CCC figures to extrapolate that one-third of all our greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 will come from individuals in how they heat their home, what they eat or what they buy. Do you have any confidence that politicians, given that this area is fraught with political ideology, will make the progress that we need in the timeframe?
Lord Deben: Politicians must remember that there is a distinction between the nanny state and giving people the information so that they can make proper choices. I am a Conservative and I believe that people should have choice, but if you are going to have choice then you ought to know the facts. Therefore, one of the things that I find most depressing about the Government’s way of doing things is that they have not had a public information campaign to explain to people even their own offers, such as the boiler scrappage scheme and other things that people do not know about. They have not learned the lesson of the warm homes campaign that people need to know what they need for their own home and need to be sure that they do not have a cowboy builder. There are all sorts of things that you can do. It is not the nanny state; it is enabling people to make decisions.
When it comes to food, it is surely not controversial to say that we all eat too much. I have seen what the health people tell me about meat. We are not asking people to do what they do. We are saying that, if we ate between 20% and 30% less meat, it would be very much better for us, particularly if we ate better meat. That is the choice we have. We ought to eat pasture-fed meat. We need animals on our farms to get the balance—I declare an interest as a small organic farmer—and have mixed production. They not only provide shit but walk in a way that has great importance in producing the crops that we want. That is why I have always said to vegans, “I am happy for you to be a vegan, but do not tell everybody that that is the answer to climate change”. It is not. I do not like people climbing on the climate change banner to try to press their own case.
It is not unreasonable for the Government, as we are moving in that direction anyway, to help people know, for example, what sort of meat is healthily produced, with proper labelling helping people make those choices. It is very good for the farming community. British beef has the lowest carbon footprint in the world. We should be celebrating and saying that, and not saying it is nanny stating. It is not. It is trying to help people who have not had the opportunities that some of us have had to know these things to have the information. I would like the Government to be prepared to do that. That is all they need to do. It seems to me pretty simple.
Again, I am afraid—this is why I was very direct with Lord Lilley—that the people who stop it are the people who do not in the end realise the urgency of all this. That is why I am trying very hard. Optimistic I am, but I am desperate about urgency. If we do not get this right, my optimism will be false and I would hate to have misled people.
The Chair: Did you want to come in on this, John?
Q10 Lord Grantchester: Not on this subject, but I will very quickly on the subject progress report. I have often wondered about electrification, because the push towards it puts great pressure on the grid. To deliver that increased capacity to every corner of the UK is a huge challenge. Is a failure to invest likely to undermine progress on other areas because of that lack of infrastructure? Should it be prioritised? I am not even sure the size of the task has been properly identified.
Lord Deben: I feel very strongly about this and I am very sad about it. Part of it is in my answer to your question about the fact that so much of the progress we have made has been in things that people have, in a curious way, had done to them by the Government. This is one thing the Government should have done much earlier. It was always obvious. The grid, after all, was created to put out electricity from a relatively small number of generating points. The French have a rather good word for that—the centrale. That is exactly what it was.
We have a very large number of generating points putting stuff into the grid. It is a different mechanism. First, the grid needs very fundamental rethinking in that sense. Secondly, we need to carry stuff. We must think so much more seriously about this. I declare an interest because I live in Suffolk, but I live quite a long way from the coast so am not really involved in this. It does seem silly to bring onshore a series of points from offshore instead of having an undersea cable that would take it all the way around. Instead of that, you are putting it onshore and then putting in more overhead pylons. It is not surprising that people get a bit upset about it. Lord Bruce, we have disagreed about this, but I think that, wherever you can make it easy for people to accept it, we must do it. I cannot understand why we have this very old-fashioned view of the grid. We need a new way of doing it.
Wales is a very good example of this. In Wales, they want to put the line around the coast, as I understand it and was told when I was last there. It is surprising that they can do it there but we cannot do it in the east of England, but that is what they want to do. There is a very big argument for putting it across Wales, because so many farms are ill served by electricity and will need it in the future. I want these things to be taken into account.
We have only just had the appointment of somebody to be in charge of it, literally a few months ago. Why was that not done a very long time ago? We all knew, and we have only just made the changes in the national grid that were very necessary, because the way it was privatised was not satisfactory as far as this is concerned. The Government have very rightly made those changes, but we ought to get on with it now.
Q11 Lord Lucas: How can the Government collaborate more effectively with support partners to deliver net zero, including individuals, local government, businesses, civil society and international partners?
Lord Deben: I would start with local authorities. We have to forge a partnership with them on this issue. This is not a criticism of the Government. When I was Secretary of State for the Environment all those years ago, I found that whenever you wanted to devolve power, the Civil Service would end up saying, “Better not, Minister, they might get it wrong”. My view is that of course some of them will get it wrong, and there are some pretty bad examples, such as Thurrock, Croydon and Woking at this moment, in which all three political parties are involved. This is not a party-political comment at all.
A good deal of this stuff can be done on a local level only through the local authority. We must get a better relationship and it must be a partnership. We are beginning to do it in some places. The Government seem to have done much better with Manchester and Teesside, which is beginning to do that, but we must get much better at working with local authorities to deliver. Local authorities must be much more willing to share that too. I once spoke to the Local Government Association. I said how much I believed in nothing being done in Brussels that could be done in Westminster, but I wanted some things done in Brussels because that was the only place we could do them. I wanted nothing done in Westminster that could not be done in county hall and I was cheered. Then I said nothing done in county hall that could not be done in the district council, and I was cheered. Then I said nothing done in the district council that could not be done in the parish council and they booed me, because it was not them.
This is a partnership. There are many things that the parish council can do in a locality; it can be the conduit to get local people working together. Your point is absolutely right as far as local authorities and administrations are concerned. We can work much more closely with all sorts of people. The Church of England and the Catholic Church are doing proportionately more than anybody else in reaching net zero. They have proper programmes. They need to be helped with their schools. There needs to be a better relationship. A quarter of the children in Britain go to denominational schools. We need to help them, not with money but with easing the way.
This is a silly example, but it will explain what I mean. In France, schools are provided with shading for the hot weather in their car parks. On the top of it, they put in photovoltaic cells and the electricity is then used to power the school. The Treasury in this country will not allow you to do that. Even though private enterprise and localities want to do it, there are technical reasons why it will not allow it. You cannot borrow the money for that to be done. Those are the changes we need to make, so that people can do sensible things. I know this because the Department for Education is pressing the Treasury to change those rules so that that sort of thing can be done.
Internationally, I have tried to say that you must not resile or go back on what you said. We are in a difficult position. The absolutely disgraceful decision to cut our overseas aid from 0.7% to 0.5% did not and does not help. It is unacceptable for rich countries, when they are in a bit of a mess, to take it out on poor countries. We can build back on this and we have to do so. We have to be a bit less “Great Britain this” and “Great Britain that” and a bit more, “Can we do it together?”, a bit more willing to learn from other people and a bit more co-operative. That is how you get things done. You may still think that you are better, but do not tell them that. Just try to do it with them.
On the last issue about institutions and businesses, business needs to feel confident that you will stick to what you say. One of the biggest problems we have with this Government and previous ones is that they have not made it clear and stuck to it. If business knows that they will stick to it, business will do the investment. If they are unsure, they will not. That is the biggest thing the Government can do—give confidence that they will go on doing what they are doing. Sometimes they will do the less good thing rather than make the change, which makes things only more difficult.
Lord Lucas: Thank you. I found that optimistic.
Lord Deben: I told you.
Q12 Lord Lucas: I look forward to your company in the Lobby on the local energy amendment when it comes back to us. Taking business in particular, it is not in the car industry’s interests to persuade us to use smaller cars. It is not in Oatly’s interests to make its milk cheaper than cow’s milk. You mentioned the failure of the oil and gas companies to make their production as green as they can. Under those circumstances, what sort of levers should the Government use?
Lord Deben: There is no one answer to this, but I started my business in sustainability 25 years ago because it seemed to me that often doing the right thing was the way to profit. Often you have to help people see that there is an advantage in it for them to using less energy and water, using less to make more. That is better for business. Avoiding future restrictions is better for business. Doing things in the timing of business rather than being forced by the Government is better for business. There are many areas where we can help people look further forward and see that it is an advantage.
That is hard because it is often not the people running the business but the shareholders who look at quarterly returns and results. There is partly a need for certainty, so that they can point to the fact that they will have to do it in that way because this is happening, and partly the Government supporting them publicly on the direction in which they want them to go.
Of course, sometimes you have to change the commercial realities. We have failed to do that in a whole series of areas. We could, for example, make large motorcars that use a great deal of energy proportionately more expensive than small motorcars. There is some distinction, but we could make it much sharper. We could make it much more expensive to fly a private airline. I understand that we have more private flights in Britain than in any other country apart from the United States. We could make that much more expensive. We could make it cheaper to go to Edinburgh by train and more expensive by air. We could do those things. We could do what I said about plugging in your motorcar. Why do we charge VAT on that when we do not charge it on the energy in our own home? That is not sensible. We can do a whole series of things. If you reduce our intake of money at the Treasury by what I am suggesting on VAT, the best way of matching that would be to increase the charge on SUVs. It is all possible.
Q13 The Chair: Can I follow up on the point you made about the Pope? When Lord Rees spoke in a recent debate in the Lords on our behaviour change report, he made the case for why we need more secular popes on climate change. We have David Attenborough and you have mentioned the Pope, who has made some strong and powerful comments on climate change. We need a few more businesspeople and more secular popes standing up to the charge. In recent years, instead of some of the strong voices that we saw in the past such as the chief executive of Unilever, to name but one, there is not that strong business voice and the secular popes we need in this space.
As you step down from the Climate Change Committee and we move into a delivery phase for climate change, I am not asking you to give advice to the Government about who should be your successor, but I would like your views on the absence of strong secular popes from the business community speaking up for climate change action.
Lord Deben: There are some and we should honour them. Mark Carney is one, for example, and until he retired Paul Polman was another. There is a whole range of people and I do not want to underestimate the real contribution they have made. The chairman of Iceland, for example, is particularly good. There is a series of people who do this.
I come back to this central point about trying to get people to understand that it is their individual personal responsibility as well as that of their business. People hide under the basis that, “I am the chairman of this company and I will tell you about the company, but I do not see myself in this”. I want every chairman to think to himself, “I will have to answer”, because they will have to answer. One of the toughest questions that grandparents will ever be asked is, “Why did you not do what could have stopped this?” We need to make them feel that they need to make this contribution and we have not done that satisfactorily.
I am all for secular popes, if you see what I mean. I recommend that only because a friend of mine, who was an atheist and one of the great climate scientists, once said to me, “If you really want to understand it, that is the best thing to understand”. As he is an atheist, I thought it was well worth quoting in that sense.
Q14 Baroness Boycott: Following up on Baroness Parminter’s question about business, in the last few weeks we have had knockbacks on three specific amendments. One was on the repeal of the EU laws. Lord Krebs tried to get in a non-regression amendment on environmental law. I had one about not having finance going towards illegal, not legal, deforestation, and Baroness Hayman was trying to get a nature clause in. We seem to be seeing massive deregulation. How is that in any way compatible? Does this depress you?
Lord Deben: There is another problem, which I can say to a Select Committee of the House of Lords, which is that ever since Tony Blair’s Government Governments really have not come to terms with the fundamental change in Parliament, which we have to recognise. I have to say this carefully because I do not want to sound like an old man looking back, but when I first got into Parliament, which was in 1970, Members of Parliament had much more power over the Executive. The Opposition had control over the timetable. Every Bill was debated in committee for at least 100 hours, so we were a revising Chamber and the House of Lords was an additional revising Chamber. Now, Bills are not discussed. They come to the House of Lords without detailed discussion. The Government do not seem to recognise that often the discussion and the amendments are nothing to do with politics. It is just to make sense of what they have put forward.
My problem is with the Government being prepared to accept those things, particularly when they say, “You don’t need this, because it’s already covered”. That is not an argument. If you do not need it and it is already covered, accept it and let it be there, because a number of people think that it is not properly covered. Do that. Part of the problem is when they talk about the reform of the House of Lords. I want reform of Parliament, because the fact is that the power of the Executive has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished. This is a hugely important role for us to deal with.
Having put it in that context, I have to say that the unwillingness of the Government to put into law what they say as Ministers is not right. It is particularly true for a Government who must recognise that perhaps they will not be the Government after the next election. I would be saying, “I’d better put this into law, because you never know what the next lot might do”. It seems a good excuse for doing this. I am sure the next lot, whoever they might be, would be then restricted in some way. It is much more the cock-up than the plot. It is not because people do not want more regulation because they are saying, “This is what we will do”, so it cannot be that. It is an unwillingness ever to think that someone else might have an idea that you have not covered. You always have to say no. I want a Government who say yes a lot more.
When I was Secretary of State, I used to say to the wonderful Freddie Howe, who was my Minister of State all those years ago, “These are the five things I need in this Act. These are the 10 things I would like to have. If you have to give way on anything else, give way because we have to get this through”. I wish that is how the Government worked now because you get better laws. We have bad laws because they are not properly debated and because the Executive demand powers that they should never had. People in the past would not have allowed it.
Q15 Lord Bruce of Bennachie: There is a huge controversy at the moment about planning and the need for housing and so forth. There is equally a problem for environmental pressure, water, the water supply and so on. Do we need a radical overhaul on a climate change basis to try to deliver? At the moment, we bumble along with some people saying, “Let the developers do it”, and other people opposing it. In every case, it seems to me that the developments do not meet the environmental standards we are looking for. What shall we do?
Lord Deben: We have said this. We should have an addition to the planning law, which is an overarching one that says that no planning permission should be given or refused without fully taking into account the Government’s commitments to net zero in 2050 and the other statutory situations. I am told by the lawyers, because I put this to one of their chambers only yesterday, that you need to say that and have a bit of an addition to make it work but, roughly speaking, that is what you have to do. That means that you do not get yourself into vast quantities of changes of planning law. You will remember that planning law takes longer and is more acrimonious and more determined than almost any other law. That is what I would do immediately. That would enable people to make decisions sensibly at every level.
The other bit that is true is that we really ought to look at the economic realities. No housebuilder wants to build on brownfield sites. They want to easy-build on a greenfield site. Unless you make it easier for them to do the one that you want on brownfield sites and more difficult on greenfield sites, you will not get the houses that you want.
Also, we have to face the fact that since the Conservative Government in 2017 foolishly put off the net zero house plans, which the Labour Party had put into operation—mind you, a bit cynically because it put it as far forward as it could, I have to say, so I do not really blame either party, but that is what happened. The housebuilders had built 1.5 million homes that are not fit for the future. That means that they have taken the profit and handed the cost to the people who bought the homes. When you think that one housebuilder offered its chief executive a £140 million bonus, you will see what is so wrong about this. The housebuilders ought to pay for it. There ought to be a fund that they have to put into for every house they have built in that way over the next year.
You can build homes that are fit for the future at the same price, because the money comes out of the cost of the land. That is what happens: you pay less for the land. But the housebuilders, of course, have now become land speculators. They all have large amounts of land, so they do not want to make that change because they have paid a price that was about building bad houses and not building the houses we need. I think the Government have to face that, and there is no doubt about it: you have to say to housebuilders, “You have to meet proper standards, and if you’ve bought land at a price that is under that, that is a cost you’ll have to carry, but in future you buy the land at a price that enables—”, and so on, because that is how you work out the land price. You say, “How much am I going to sell the house for? This is what it is going to cost me, that is what I have to pay to the local authority, so I can pay this much for the land”. That is what they will do if you set the targets, but we have to set those, and we are still waiting for them.
Q16 Lord Whitty: I will come to a subject that we have not touched on. You are still relying very substantially on behaviour change. We did a report on behaviour change and touched on this but not very strongly. Behaviour change is driven by a lot of things, but the messages that get to the ordinary consumer come largely through the advertising industry. Most adverts for cars are for big gas-guzzling cars. Most adverts for food are for food that is not good for you or for the planet. A government campaign to counter that would probably fall on deaf ears because it is the Government, but do you think there is a role for greater regulation or self-regulation of the information that gets put across in the advertising industry in specific fields? Otherwise, behaviour will be very slow to change.
Lord Deben: I think there are different answers for different parts of the industry. I have been close to the food industry. I was on the sector council and actually created the sector council in the sense of working out how we did it, so I am very close to the food industry. I think it has a real issue coming its way, which is ultra-high-processed food. The evidence is mounting that this is serious and we will have to face it. Of course, most advertising is for ultra high-processed food. It will be a real issue from the perspective of science, which is becoming clearer. It is not certain, but any of you who have not read Chris van Tulleken’s book Ultra-Processed People really ought to do that.
I think pressures will come from the marketplace. I have noticed that my family now looks much more carefully at the ingredients and, for example, buy bread that has the three likely ingredients, which are wheat, yeast and water, rather than those that have a whole list of things, including things you never thought were in bread, like rice flour and others that you do not understand.
There are some areas that are helping people to understand the choices they are making for health reasons, but I want to help people to make their own choices. If they want to eat things that are not good for them, they must have the right to do so, but they must have the information to make those choices. I am not in favour of any regulation that we do not need, and I want good regulation rather than bad regulation, so I am on that side and always have been. I am also conscious of the responsibility that we all have here of being fortunate enough to be educated enough to know things that some people have not had the chance to know. I notice with the people who work with us in my businesses, at home and the rest of it that if you just talk about things in a simple way, they say, “Oh gosh, I didn’t really understand that. I didn’t know that”.
We have to find ways of helping them to do that, not a contrary advertising campaign but giving people opportunities to choose. The supermarkets have to learn their role in this, and some of them are. Choice editing is a curious phrase, but it is not a bad thing. It is about where you put things and how you help people to make proper decisions. We are at an in-between stage with the motor car industry, which wants to get rid of the cars that it will not be able to sell after 2030. I think there are other reasons for pressing this. The real answer there is that you could make the market work better if you made it cheaper than it is now to buy the right car, and you would still take the same amount of money in if you have that balance right. I think we can do lots of things. A “Government tells” sort of wartime statement will make no difference, it will not work, and we could not spend the money that some companies spend.
I forgot to talk about Oatly, by the way. If you are going to have a dairy substitute, which I think is a mistake, oat milk is the best one. You should never have almond milk or soya milk, all of which are much worse for the environment than dairy or oat milk.
Q17 The Duke of Wellington: I would hardly describe this question as burning and, of course, I must declare my agricultural interest, as I always do. I was so pleased that you made a distinction between good meat and bad meat in the sense of pasture-fed versus intensive farming, which has done so much damage to the environment in so many ways. What a pity you are not continuing in your current role. That is a great sadness, and I am sure that everyone around this table admires your record in your role at the moment.
You are a Member of the House of Lords. If you were a member of this committee, what would you recommend that we do next as a piece of work?
Lord Deben: That is the hardest question of all. There are so many. I will tell you one thing that I think would make a difference. There are many incidental barriers to doing the right thing that have arisen because of the way we used to do things. One reason why we cannot have the pipe around the sea is because rules were laid down to keep competition between different arrays that do not really count now. There is the point I made about the Treasury and the photovoltaic cells. There are many things that get in the way that people do not need to have and for which there is no theological, philosophic, political reason for having. No one has looked at how you make sure that those things are put right.
I have a theory that we would make a huge difference if, instead of a better regulation committee or a deregulation committee, we had a properly run centre where anybody who found one of these could say and it was duty bound to try to put it right and close it. There are so many things that are in the way, and I wonder whether we could do a bit of research on the major ones and propose the changes that are administrative, legal, the sort of thing that the Law Commission does about laws: look at where we are and what changes could be made administratively to make things easier.
That is what I have suggested for planning: the things that do not cost and may indeed reduce the cost. I am told that there are rules in Scotland, which may have been overcome now, about small turbines in water that make it more difficult to do that and which we could get rid of. Nobody is doing this, because nobody feels that it is big enough. If you put it together, it is huge. If the committee thought it could do something along those lines, it would be doing something that no one else has done, and that must be a good thing.
Q18 Lord Lilley: I think there is more agreement between us than everybody might have thought. We are both agreed that we do not want to reduce the supply of fossil fuels more rapidly than the demand for them or we will end up in a difficult situation, either in the UK or in the world as a whole. Your sole reason for limiting the supply of oil and gas and further development of oil and gas in the UK is so that we can in some way exercise more persuasion to stop African countries for some reason starting oil and gas industries. Is that it?
Lord Deben: That is nearly it. I want to agree with you, Lord Lilley, as we have known each other for longer than most people around this table. What I am saying is that the world has to reduce the amount of oil that it is producing. The International Energy Agency has said that means that we should not be producing new sources. There is real pressure from the oil companies, particularly from very bad oil companies like ExxonMobil, which is unashamedly not doing anything to change its attitude, to get countries to allow them to produce more oil from those countries. That is what is happening.
Britain has been significantly successful in setting an example that other people have followed to get to net zero. When you think of the countries that Alok Sharma got on side and the work that has been done by previous Governments, the fact of the matter is that we are influential and we can change it. We should say to the world, “We’re not going to be an addition to the production. We’re going to go on using what we have to use on a declining basis, but we’re going to speed up the switch from oil and gas to that much cheaper thing called renewable energy. At the same time, we’ll help you to do it”. It is terribly important that we do that. I can tell you the Republican Party in America is busy trying to encourage African nations to take on more gas and oil. That is its policy, particularly gas, because it says as an excuse that is better for the environment.
I have to say to you, Lord Lilley, that there is a real issue here. People on the other side who do not care are trying to make these countries produce or start to produce more. We have to set that example; otherwise, people think that we are only saying things and not doing them. In a sense, the fact that it is hard makes it credible. I am afraid that we will have to do some hard things to achieve what, in the end, I come back to, which is the urgent need to have a world in which our children will be able to grow up and live lives anything like the very, very fortunate lives all of us have lived.
The Chair: Thank you. That is a very powerful place to end this session. I think we all concur with the words of the Duke of Wellington that we all admire your record. You have been a redoubtable champion for net zero and we look forward to the many years to come, using the platforms here in the House and elsewhere, that you have to carry on making the case. With that, we thank you very sincerely, Lord Deben.
