UK path to net zero: a COP 27 special

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The public wants to see action, Chris Stark says. In a cost of living crisis, Government must move things around to suit the circumstances. “Investments in new technologies and “big savings for people in the economy” are parts of the “profoundly positive journey to net zero”, he said.  

Following the insight interview with Chris Stark, Darren is joined by Philip Dunne, Conservative Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, and Liberal Democrat Peer and Chair of the Lords’ Environment and Climate Change Committee, Baroness Kate Parminter. They outline the practical recommendations their committees have been making to ministers through inquiries on energy efficiency and behaviour change for climate and environmental goals.

Transcript

Darren: Hello. COP27, the United Nations Climate Conference took place in Egypt in November. The UK set itself a legal target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Today, we are asking what happens to our net zero ambitions in a cost-of-living crisis.

Welcome to Committee Corridor. I'm Darren Jones, Chair of the House of Commons Business Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee. Today, we are reflecting on COP27.

Although the spotlight has been on fossil fuels, a proposal to phase out all fossil fuels at the COP27 talks in Sharm El-Sheikh went nowhere. And our ability to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre industrial levels is now in real doubt.

Today, we hear from two parliamentary committees that are resolutely focused on the environment.

Philip Dunne, chairs the Commons Environmental Audit Committee. He's the conservative MP for Ludlow.

Baroness Kate Parminter is the Liberal Democrat peer in the House of Lords. She chairs the Lord's Environment and Climate Change Committee.

But first, Chris Stark is the Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee, slightly confusingly as it's not a parliamentary committee in the way we've got used to talking about them here on the podcast.

The Climate Change Committee is an independent statutory body set up by government to help keep the UK and devolved  government on target to reduce our emissions. It reports directly to Parliament on the progress that's been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and how we're preparing for, and adapting to the impacts of climate change.

I began by asking Chris if I was right to feel disappointed with the headlines from the COP27 Conference.

Chris: I had lots of worries going into the Egypt COP that nothing would be achieved because they had made this issue of loss and damage such a big factor going into it. And lo and behold, we have now got for the first time an acknowledgement that there should be some genuine progress on loss and damage.

We don't actually know what will happen because that will be for future COPs, but we've got full acknowledgement crucially from the rich Western economies that loss and damage is a thing.

So, that's the challenge of essentially recovering from the impacts of climate change and that that burden of the cost for paying for that shouldn't fall solely on those parts of the world that are experiencing those impacts created by the West.

So, kind of an interesting question of whether there might be some flow of funding now to the poorer parts of the world feeling the effects of climate change.

But the biggest disappointment really is on the other side of all this, which is the underlying cause of it, and what we do on greenhouse gas emissions globally. And we do not have the progress that we need really. And if you want to see the perfect summation of it, look at what Alok Sharma said in his closing comments; he said, “Emissions peaking before 2025, not in this text. Follow-through on the phase down of coal, not in this text. Commitment to phase out all fossil fuels, not in this text.”

And that is a statement of fact, I'm afraid. And we are slowly moving to a position where I'm afraid the one-and-a-half-degree target is moving out of sight. So, there is lots to worry about there, really.

Darren: Where we've got to at the end of COP27, I'm genuinely not sure, based on the evidence, I have confidence in our ability to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

And my concern about that is, as you've just alluded to, we have two sides of the coin. We've got action to try to limit global warming, and then action to prepare for it. And if we're not going to keep it to 1.5, and I think we're currently on track for maybe 2.4, 2.5, I think. My understanding of that is that the world will look fundamentally very, very different.

And some of the work we did on the National Security Joint Committee in Parliament illustrated that even in the UK we've not even really started to prepare the country for more extreme weather disruption to global supply chains or the changing geopolitical nature of politics.

Is it all that dire?

Chris: I mean, again, I think it depends with the context for what you regard as progress or otherwise. You're absolutely right to point those things out.

So, at the moment we've warmed the world by about 1.2 degrees centigrade. That might not sound a lot, but it is a lot in planetary terms, especially over the pace and time in which it's happened.

That is driving the change in the climate that I think everyone is now experiencing. It doesn't really matter where you are in the world now, climate change is with us. This summer, we had the hottest-ever recorded temperature in the UK. We are seeing water shortages every year.

We're seeing overheating, quite shocking. That we know of, 2000 people in the UK died in their homes through overheating this year. That is a shocking stat, which only gets worse into the future.

And if you think it's bad here, it's much, much worse in other parts of the world. So, we are at that point now, I think that's what's driving the public consciousness more than anything on climate change.

Fascinating that we have a Prime Minister who tried not to go to COP and didn't feel able not to go to COP. So, I think that's a new development is that each year, the COP now looks like it's going to have the attention of top-level politicians from the UK, from the U.S. I think that's probably progress.

But there is lots I'm afraid that we are not doing to prepare for that kind of warming. So, most of the focus in the UK and in the Western economies goes on this challenge of net zero. [The] very important challenge of cutting emissions to net zero. That's the point globally when we stop warming the planet, very, very important that we focus on that.

But we're going to have to get to net zero in a warming climate. So, I think we have to… more and more talk about doing these two things together and we've going to have to find a way of discussing that in a progressive positive way.

So, we've been having a go at that in my organisation, talking about a well-adapted net zero society, one that's ready for those kind of changes that I talked about. And there are lots of them.

And if we can bring that about, then I think we've got more chance of bringing people along with us on this journey rather than having things imposed upon people. That's the kind of outcome they'll want to see.

We've done quite well, I think in preparing the UK populace for the kind of changes that would be needed to hit net zero. I don't think we've done nearly as much as we need to prepare them for the kind of adaptations that we'll need for that warming climate.

Darren: And this net zero journey is important not just for government, but for industry and the whole economy. Which sectors are performing the best at net zero and which sectors have got a lot more heavy lifting to do? 

Chris: That's such a good question. We do an annual report to parliament, to you actually, on the progress that is being made across the country. And we threw everything at it this year because we have a brand new way of looking at the challenge of monitoring progress, which you can see in a report we published back in June. And it's really worth a look if you're interested.

But this issue of which sectors are progressing was at the heart of it. What we see interestingly, is that overall, progress is too slow. And there's lots of risk in there. There are some glimmers of positive progress though. The most obvious areas are in the power sector.

We've got quite a good plan in place now to grow, particularly renewables. Now, recently the government's been very clear on nuclear as well being part of that mix of decarbonised electricity supply technologies. Quite keen on that course progressing, but it's good to see that in place.

Interestingly, the other area where we've spotted progress which was a little unexpected is in surface transport and in particular, the biggest challenge of getting fossil-fueled vehicles off our roads and replacing them with fully decarbonised vehicles, mostly electric.

And if you look at the pathways that we've drawn to hit the targets for the country and the government also has pathways that have certain milestones in them, happy news is that we are already seeing sales of electric vehicles that are ahead of those pathways.

So, that gives you a clue that actually this thing's starting to happen at scale and that if that continues, we may even decarbonise transport more quickly than we thought we could. But in other areas, and I won't go through them all, we are not seeing the kind of progress that we'd need to see.

The one area that we've really highlighted as lacking in progress is in agriculture; farming, there isn't really a set of policies in place at all to deliver the emissions deduction that the government itself says it wants to deliver.

So, there's a sort of magical thinking going on there. There's no reason to believe that emissions will fall without some sort of policy in place. So, we've been trying to shine a light on the fact that Defra in particular, just hasn't got a policy program that's compatible with net zero.

But there are a host of other areas where that's the case too, particularly in buildings, in industry, all sorts of places where we just got to get going, and we run out of time if we don't put those policies in place because they don't have an immediate effect. So, this is a critical point to give that message to ministers.

And when you look at the real-world indicators of progress in each of the sectors, the things that actually need to change around us, you don't see the kind of shifts yet that would give me confidence that we're on track. And that kind of idea of tracking the risk of under delivery is more and more what I think the Climate Change Committee is here to do.

We are looking not just for the existence of a policy anymore, not just for the existence of a strategy, but whether we're actually seeing delivery on the ground. And when we look at that challenge overall, probably we have in place policies that we could say would deliver maybe 40% of the emissions deductions that the UK has signed up to.

The rest of it looks pretty uncertain, pretty risky, basically. So, we're in the midst of a pretty risky plan to get to net zero and you might question whether that plan's going to work or not.

Darren: The delivery question's really interesting, isn't it, because ministers have said to me and the committee in the past, it's for government to set their kind of policy signal to set the direction of travel.

But outside o f running schools and hospitals and prisons, it's not really for ministers to pull a lever and for the energy market or the automotive sector or loads of other basically privately owned parts of the economy to just do what ministers are telling them to do.

So, how well are businesses performing at making this transition as well?

Chris: Well, the businesses are completely key to this. Most of the progress that we will make as a country, as we get to net zero, most of the progress that we'll need to make if we're adapting to the warming climate, as I talked about, will be made principally by business.

And actually, it's an investment challenge mainly. So, when we look at the net zero challenge, it's often described as a kind of prescription for stopping things. It's not really that at all. It's more about a prescription for building things, for investing in new things.

And actually, I'd really like to discuss it that way because it's a much more positive framing of it. That we need to build lots and lots of new things to get to net zero. And in the process of investing in those new things, we also get these big savings to people in the economy and using all these new capital assets and technologies that we've been investing in to get to net zero.

And when you think about it that way, it's profoundly positive to make the journey to net zero. And you don't need to care about climate change to want to see that happen, which is the other exciting thing about it.

But my experience… the kind of interest thing is when businesses are given the signal to invest in something, and when the policies help them to do that, they will do it. So, we see that most obviously in the power sector where we've had really good policy-making that has helped billions of pounds of investment flow to the priorities that will decarbonise the power sector.

You don't see that in other parts of the world and that's a real UK success story. But businesses haven't been given the same signal in other parts of the economy. And that's one aspect of the failure I think that we have in front of us in the policy program.

That's the role of policy. It’s not to do it all through policy, its to help shape flows of private finance, mostly from businesses. So, that's one aspect of it.

And then the other thing we've been looking at recently is this issue of greenwashing, which is a really interesting thing. We've always talked about greenwashing; greenwashing — this idea that you kind of drape a green flag over everything that you're doing and call it a climate strategy.

We are seeing more and more that corporates are signing up to net zero within their business, which is a kind of new thing. I mean, I've been in this job for five years; five years ago, we weren't really seeing any of that. Net zero wasn't something that was in the public consciousness at all.

But we now see that corporates have got these really, really ambitious net zero pledges. And interestingly, as they've set the pledge and then looked at how they can decarbonise their supply chain, they find it's really difficult.

And what they typically do, we are seeing, is rather than abandon the pledge for net zero, they avoid all the hard stuff that needs to be done to decarbonise the supply chain, all the investment that needs to be made. And they go to something cheaper, which is offsetting.

So, they might pay for very cheap forestry offsets or credits as they’re sometimes called. They're much, much cheaper than insulating the business's buildings or investing in a decarbonised electric vehicle fleet.

Things that they don't tend to want to do because they carry some costs in the short-term.  These offsets are just a cheaper way to do it. So, I think there's all sorts of dangers here in thinking that the private sector will simply deliver all this. They need to be helped to the right kind of answers, policy has to help them there too.

So, too does information, and we've got a role, I think, to provide better information to the corporate community on how to do all this well.

Darren: So, you said the power sector was doing well and I recognise that broadly. But even in that sector, we've had some pretty difficult exchanges in front of the Select Committee recently.

I mean, BP came to speak to us about their investments in non-fossil fuel technologies, but they weren't really willing to tell us how much they were spending on what, even though we told them in advance, we wanted to know that information.

And Drax also had a pretty difficult time with us because they're a big power plant in the UK. They produce a lot of our electricity and they do it by burning wood. But even though they're the largest emitter of carbon emissions in the power sector in the UK, by 2027, they'll have received 11 billion pounds of subsidy from government.

And the answer that the CEO of Drax gave to me was, “Well, our carbon emissions are different to other people's carbon emissions, therefore, that's okay.” I mean, that seemed like a bit of a cop out to me. What did you think about that?

Chris: Yeah, I mean I have some sympathy with the idea that the biomass as it’s sometimes called, which is burned in that power plant in Yorkshire is different to say, coal.

The reason for that is coal took millions of years to put into the ground, and you take it out and burn it, and it takes a lot longer to go back down again. So, that's slightly different from the biomass, which essentially comes from forests that is burned in that power plant.

But there is an emission from burning that wood, and there's no escaping that. And although in global accounting terms, we look at biomass as a renewable source, the reason we look at that is because essentially, if you take it away from the forest and then grow another tree, then you can say it's a renewable source.

But of course, there's a footprint there, it takes time for that process to work through. I suppose in our work, what we've done points very clearly to the idea that a power station like Drax in the UK is not something that you want to repeat.

So, it made sense once for it to move away from coal to biomass, essentially burning that wood instead of coal to generate electricity. But we now need to move on to  the next stage of that use of biomass.

And we do the job, which it's such a privilege to do … my job is to stand in 2050 knowing that we've hit the net zero target and looking back to where we are today to try and give a sense of what the best strategy would've been to get to that point with the least friction, and it gives you a different kind of insight.

Something like biomass, which is actually quite a good replacement for fossil fuels, is incredibly valuable in 2050. We need to be using it in the best possible places because we don't have enough of it to replace fossil fuels, and burning it unabated as we call it (that means burning it without capturing those emissions) is increasingly anachronistic. 

Darren: And of course, a lot of people we can tell from polling really worry about climate change and we know from citizens assemblies and polling, and focus groups, and just feedback from the public through media or with our politicians that they want us to make progress on this.

But equally, everyone is living through the middle of the cost-of-living crisis. Many people are struggling with making ends meet. Do you think this is going to put people off the hard work ahead on tackling climate change in net zero? Or would you think it's an opportunity to speed it up and make the positive case for a kind of more sustainable and ideally, cheaper future for people?

Chris: So, it's hard to answer that question with a simple answer. I think the way to answer it is to say that we've got choices.

There is a very appealing world from my perspective where we bring together the cost of energy and the cost-of-living crisis with the priorities for climate. And we do everything together.

And I think the world at large is ready for that. In the UK, you see consistently in surveys that are done that people are aware of the problem that climate change is now creating and they want to see action on that.

But I don't think you can expect that people who can't afford their gas bill this month are going to go shopping for a heat pump. So, you've got to have something that is of the moment, and we've been making that point pretty consistently. There isn't one plan for net zero. You can move things around to suit the circumstances.

We wrote a letter to the Chancellor shortly before the autumn statement, which made this point. It was an interesting moment to send that letter that the Chancellor is now on the hook for your energy bill this year. So, that changes things pretty dramatically.

I think it changes the treasury's attitude towards some of the key issues. If you want to reduce energy demand, suddenly, that's a very good thing to do for all sorts of reasons.

It's good for the climate, it's good for people of course, and their household budgets, but it's also good for the Exchequer because otherwise, they'll pay for it. So, that  idea is very much at the heart of what we've been saying to government recently, is let's do the cheap stuff now, let's do the really simple stuff now.

Some of that, a lot of that is free. So, one of the more remarkable stats in that letter is that if the government just went about telling people to close their curtains at night, the Treasury might save £40 million this year, quite an amazing stat.

It's actually, essentially a free thing that the government could do. Just think that through; you could have an advisory service that the government set up that could be funded to the tune of £38 million, and it would still be worthwhile.

So, these things really make sense. And there are a host of other things that make sense too. But in a sense, I think in the moment that we're in now, we want to prepare people for the stuff that happens later by doing the cheap stuff now that helps with the cost-of-living, prepares us, makes the problem of decarbonising smaller in the future.

And I think that's the way into this, actually. It's not to imagine that you need to do absolutely everything this year in the middle of the cost-of-living crisis.

Darren: And you took part in Parliament's Climate Assembly on net zero which is covered by a documentary on BBC’s iPlayer if listeners wish watch it. And that actually was an enormously positive experience, wasn't it? You had a whole mix of people from across the country coming together, some climate activists, some climate deniers, some people that didn't really know anything about it at all. 

And by the end of the process where they were informed by evidence and witnesses, they all seemed pretty motivated about the changes we have to make as a country, and kind of expecting politicians as well as businesses to get on with it. I mean, that should be a positive message, shouldn't it, for all of us about the work that we've got to do ahead of us?

Chris: I really agree with that. I mean, I think it was very interesting to take part in that Climate Assembly, and I went on my own little journey with that assembly. We had just finished this enormous piece of analytical work leading to the advice that the UK should set a net zero target, and it was an enormous piece of work for us to do.

Lots of spreadsheets and technical work and all sort of things that you'd expect from an advisory body like us. And then parliament decided to do this thing where we brought together people and I was asked if I'd be part of it.

And my initial reaction was I'm not sure I want to be part of this because it might undermine the work that we've done. And I now realise I had a massive chip in my shoulder, and I've thought about that a lot actually, that it was really interesting. It was such a well-managed process, with real experts and bringing the process together.

And it turns out that if you take real people with a variety of views, including on climate change itself through a  pretty well-structured process of understanding how the UK could get to net zero — not whether we should get to net zero, but how we might get there. [The] kind of “how”  question is really important.

They come up with perfectly sensible outlooks on this thing, which actually matched quite nicely some of the deep technical work that we'd done even though we were coming at it from totally different angles.

That gave me a lot of faith actually that we should be more willing to have a conversation with people about the changes ahead.  Rather than sort of protecting it as I thought I should in that early phase, sitting away in my ivory tower looking at spreadsheets and imagining that I had the answer. We need to broaden the discussion.

And then that takes you into the next question about whether actually that might help. It’s really interesting to think that way. Sometimes you hear this term co-production, so co-producing the policies that we need.

I now think  if we don't do that, we're not going to succeed on net zero. We're going to fail if we don't understand  what people want and how they react to that.

One of the most enlightening bits of that whole process, which was an enormous process leading to this enormous report at the end of it, was about how we decarbonise heating in buildings. Which is the issue really.

It's probably the area that is closest to home in all senses of the word. So, we're talking about doing something in people's homes to decarbonise the way they are heated and hopefully, to keep those homes better insulated and more energy efficient.

They were all over that. Interestingly, we brought them because we are policy people, a lot of technology choices. And they really weren't that interested in the technology choices. I mean, they wanted to know how things worked, but they were much more interested in the practicality of it.

So, can this be done in one or two visits rather than several? Really interesting, that came out of the discussion. Are there local jobs in this? That came out of the discussion; things that we might not typically have thought about that local jobs thing, big thing.

And then probably the biggest message actually was can we have a say in some of these choices? And you learn that actually, that's probably the way into this actually, is not to squirrel away in Whitehall thinking about technology choices with technologists and academics.

It's to get out there and talk to people about the practicality of making these changes and presenting it to them in a positive way. I think we need to think more actively about some of these, you might call them social factors, because actually, the transition now rests on people wanting to see this happen.

And some of those people care about climate change, most of them are thinking about other things. So, we need to be presenting all of this as a positive set of steps for all sorts of reasons. I'm very confident we can do that.  

But not imagining that this is just about net zero and just about a piece of legislation, or just about climate. It's about a host of things that matter in a very deep way to people living in the UK at the moment.

My thanks to Chris Stark, Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee. The House of Commons and the House of Lords both have committees that are primarily focused on the environment.

Whilst the Commons Committee looks across the work of government departments, the Lords Committee looks into specialist subjects, taking advantage of the prior expertise of their individual members.

Baroness Kate Parminter is a Liberal Democrat peer in the House of Lords. She chairs the Lord's Environment and Climate Change Committee.

Philip Dunne, chairs the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, and he's the Conservative MP for Ludlow.

We've just heard from Chris Stark that there was some good news out of COP27 with a new fund established for loss and damage in developing countries. But other than that, I was feeling a bit depressed about the outcomes of COP27. What did you think first? Philip Dunne.

Philip: Well, thank you, Darren. It's good to join you today.

Yes, I wasn't in Egypt, but a couple of members of my committee were there, and they came back with that sort of sense of disappointment that the progress made in Glasgow the year before under the UK's chairmanship, jointly with Italy, had been successful in getting loss and damage onto the agenda and clearly a big win there.

I think you and I were both present when John Kerry came through on his way to COP, and he was saying that was the big win that he was looking for. So, that was good.

I think the thing that was disappointing was that further progress was not made on delivering more on the obligations and commitments by nations.

I think sort of finally, I would just say that it did demonstrate that the leadership that had been given by the COP26 President, Alok Sharma, with his political and diplomatic heft had achieved a great deal in Glasgow in bringing countries up to speed.

And it did appear to be lacking. So, I think the fact that the UK leadership under Alok Sharma has now come to an end is an inevitable consequence of the process, but is disappointing.

Darren: And so Kate Parminter, did you have a more positive reflection on COP27?

Kate: No, I'm sorry, I can't say I did, which is very sad to say. I mean, like Philip, I agree that the leadership shown by the UK government at COP26 was really helpful. But when we got to COP27, I mean, I think given the fact that we're on track still in the excess of two degrees, the leadership shown just wasn't fast enough by any stretch of any imagination.

And we didn't make any advances on phasing down of unabated coal power, or indeed, on phasing out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. So, I think looking back on COP27 and 2022 in general, I think where the successes are, are outside COP27.

It's frankly things like the Inflation Reduction Act in America, people will look back on and say that that was what was good for the climate in 2022. And we've just got to hope that when we get to the United Arab Emirates in ‘28, that we can get back on track and get some of these nationally determined contributions really up to the mark.

Otherwise, we don't stand any chance of making the progress that we know the world needs to make.

Darren: And just looking a bit closer to home, on your committee in the House of Lords, Kate, you are starting to take evidence on the boiler upgrade scheme. We all know we've got to change the way we heat our homes in the long run to hit our net zero target.

What kind of questions do you think you'll be asking during that committee inquiry?

Kate: Well, this is a new initiative by the government. It only started earlier this year, but we think it's really important because it's so key that we manage to get our homes heated in a low carbon way.

We task the government now to see if they can meet the targets that they've set themselves of 600,000 homes to have heat pumps by 2028.

So, the sort of questions, Darren, that we're going to be asking is, is the funding that's being offered to individuals sufficient — it's around £5,000 per home, and the average cost of an air source heat pump is about £12,000, or your gas boiler is around £2,000 to £3,000.

So, is that a sufficient amount to encourage people to adopt air-source heat pumps? And again, the length of the scheme, it's three years, and yet, we've got to use this scheme to effectively sort of seed up the industry to invest in the training and the equipment to ensure that we can get these homes ready for the changes that we need.

So, I think we've got some really big questions, particularly when you look at what's happened in France where it's taken them over a decade with a really strong regulatory program and a number of such schemes to move from a base of about a hundred thousand heat pumps in a year to where they are now, and a decade later of over half a million.

Darren: And Philip Dunne, one of the conditions to get access to the boiler upgrade voucher is that you've done all of the energy efficiency work in your home as set out on your energy performance certificate.

Your committee did a very timely report on the government's delivery of energy efficiency upgrades to British homes. And at the time, you were not very happy with the way that the government responded to your recommendations. Has that improved since your report was published?

Philip: Well, Darren, you'll remember that we published our report in March, I think it was, last year, and a week later, the government scrapped the Green Homes Grant scheme, which we'd said should be extended and increased. So, that was disappointing.

But since then, the government did introduce in the budget this March, the VAT cut on insulation and energy efficiency measures. That was very welcomed. That's going to last for five years. That's an immediate cut in the cost to make it more affordable for householders.

And then the other significant move, this autumn statement by the current administration, which is very welcomed, was introducing a target to reduce demand from buildings by 15% by 2030.

So, the energy efficiency task force has been set up to decide how best to achieve that. And I think that is a good move because as Kate was saying, the industry needs some security that these measures are going to endure. And what was announced in the autumn statement was £6 billion, admittedly from 2025. But that will follow on from the existing schemes.

There needs to be a seamless transition, I think, for 10 years to be able to give householders, and in particular, the construction industry, have got to train people up to do this work, to insulate their homes better, to decarbonise by using heat pumps, and in due course, potentially, hydrogen, if the gas system can be made good to take it, and we can produce hydrogen cheaply enough.

This is all going to require a significant amount of training and investment by the construction industry. And they need to know that these schemes are not stop/start schemes.

Darren: And we know that the bulk of the work on energy efficiency is around retrofitting existing homes. But for new build, we're still having new build houses built without solar panels, without heat pumps, with cheaper construction methods so that homes are not thermally as efficient as they as they can be.

I understand you've had some positive news recently, Philip, about low carbon construction. What is it that you've been hearing?

Philip: Well, we were arguing for the future home standard to be brought forward from 2025. That, I think is not going to be the case on a mandatory basis. But we've heard that there will be voluntary steps encouraged by the government to encourage the construction industry to do so.

I think the other thing to say is that the government has launched a consultation on implementing our main recommendation that we made looking at this in the round, which is that we should have whole-life carbon assessments undertaken for commercial and large residential buildings, in order to give both the owners, the occupiers and the constructors a good understanding of the emissions, not just to operate the buildings, but to build them or to refurbish them in the first place.

This has been introduced in law in France and the Netherlands, it's coming in in California, it's going to come here. And I'm very pleased that the government has decided to consult on it following our recommendation.

Darren: Very good. And Kate Parminter, your committee has been looking at some of the behavioural changes that people might have to make in order for us to hit net zero. We've just spent some time talking about buildings because that's one of our biggest challenges in the country.

But there are lots of other areas where we need to reduce our carbon emissions. What did you find about people's willingness to change their behaviours to reduce carbon emissions?

Kate: Well, the evidence from most polling shows that people are really determined to make their own impact on tackling climate change and are keen to be able to do what's needed, whether it's about adopting new technologies or buying new products or services, or indeed, reducing their carbon consumption.

However, there are barriers in the way and if you're talking about buying electric cars or choosing certain products, there are often barriers around cost and time. And so, what we did was we looked at what the government was doing in terms of supporting people to make the changes that those people want them to do.

And looking at what the government is actually doing, which we know people are expecting them to show proper leadership on. And we identified that about a third of all the greenhouse gas emissions that are going to be needed by 2035 are going to come from people.

So, the government really needs to step up to the plate now and to do two things; firstly, to start using all the levers that it has at its disposal. I mean, Philip was talking a moment ago about sort of the regulatory framework and how we need to change the regulations for businesses to give a steer to the market in the way that the government has helpfully done by saying we are going to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2030.

That has helped move the agenda forward, but it's just not making the same sort of progress in other areas where we need people to make those changes, which is around their homes, around what they eat, and what they buy.

And it seems to be sadly that the reluctance to do this as was demonstrated all too visibly in the government's net zero strategy, is around the fact that they don't want to get into the territory of sort of telling people as they see what it is they should be doing.

Whereas in fact, it's about giving people the information to enable them to make the right choices for themselves and to be supporting them through fiscal means and through regulation to adopt the changes that we know we're going to have to do.

Darren: And Philip, did you want to respond to Kate's comments? We went around the houses a bit with the government on a winter campaign to advise people how they might reduce their energy bills by their boiler flow rate or their thermostat.

We've got to the right place in the end. The government's now going to be funding a campaign to help people. Why is there a nervousness around advice for people on behavioural changes, do you think?

Philip: Well, I think governments get into trouble when they tell the public what to do too much. So, I'm a Conservative Darren, and you may have a different view about this.

But my view is that individuals should make their own decisions and they should get advice from government and government agencies about the options that are available. But I think mandating change can be quite difficult.

We have obviously done it in some areas. So, banning the sale of petrol and diesel-fueled vehicles in 10 or so years’ time is a decision the government has taken. But we've looked at — and there's lots of technical innovation coming through this space.

I think the government has set out in the net zero strategy a framework within which it wants to try and stimulate innovation. I've actually just come from a session earlier today where innovative people coming mostly out of Cambridge, are sort of pitching their ideas for innovation to deliver net zero across a whole range of aspects.

I think there is a lot of innovation in this country. We need to provide the right circumstances for that to flourish and some of it will get us there on the journey to net zero emissions.

Darren: Yes, I think that's right. My committee instantly recommended that government should be funding as it used to a kind of independent advice service. So, that if people need to know what a heat pump is and what they might least be thinking about in terms of their car or other ways of reducing their emissions, they have some trusted independent advice in order to make those decisions.

But just moving on, we always ask this question on our podcast but you are in the real committee corridor in the palace, and of course, that connects both the Lords and the House of Commons. So, we're all likely to bump into each other now and again.

And you get into the lift and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is in the lift and you've got the time to make an elevator pitch. What is it that's going to be your priority message to the Prime Minister? Kate Parminter first.

Kate: I would request the government to introduce a frequent flyer levy on long-haul international flights because one of the things we learnt during our behaviour change inquiry was that people really want the policies to be seen to be fair.

And as it stands at the moment, international flights use a huge amount of carbon, and it's a very small percentage. 70% of the flights are taken by 15% of the population. And so, we think it's a fair way, and it will send a very strong signal that this government is going to start tackling the climate change issue and to do so, in a fair way.

Darren: Philip Dunne?

Philip: Well, I would press him on the subject that I've raised with him directly in the Chamber, which is on how does the government organise itself in order to deliver the net zero ambition.

With the forcing factor of the presidency of COP26 last year, the whole of government effort came together in order to derive our national determined contribution, it was a very successful working across government departments.

I know having been a minister in two government departments, how difficult it is for things like the environment which crosses across administrative boundaries, not to be siloed within each department.

We need a whole of government approach to this, and I know the Prime Minister has said he intends to drive that through, but I think he's going to need some structural help across government to do that.

Darren: Kate and Philip, thanks for joining me.

And if you'd like to find out more about what's happening in the House of Lords, you can check out the House of Lords Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. It's also where you can find every episode of Committee Corridor.

Our next episode is the final one of this series on the cost-of-living crisis. We hope you'll join us on December the 22nd when we'll be asking who's picking up the tab and how.

I'm Darren Jones, Chair of the House of Commons Business Committee, and you've been listening to Committee Corridor. Thank you for listening.

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