Rishi Sunak said on Thursday that there had not been enough honesty and transparency about what is involved in the transition to net zero. And he has done various media appearances since his speech on Wednesday doubling down on the government’s U-turn on net zero policies. Here we examine five of Sunak’s key claims.
1. Climate targets
The claim: Sunak said he was not slowing down on climate targets and that the government had consistently overdelivered in meeting its targets so far.
For many years, the UK was a world leader on the climate, cutting greenhouse gas emissions further and faster than any other G7 economy. However, much of this was achieved long before this government, as a result of structural changes in the UK economy stretching back to the 1980s. The “dash for gas” took place in the 1990s and 2000s, replacing coal-fired power generation with North Sea gas, and accounts for most of the 50% fall in UK emissions since 1990.
Emissions from the power sector have continued to fall as more renewable energy is installed, helping the UK to meet its five-yearly carbon budgets to date, but carbon from transport, housing and farming has barely budged in the past decade.
Those are the key areas that would have been addressed under plans such as the switch to electric vehicles and heat pumps. Weakening those policies puts the UK’s current and future carbon targets in doubt. According to the statutory Committee on Climate Change (CCC), the government was already off track to meet the fifth and sixth carbon budgets, running from 2028 to 2032 and 2033 to 2037. Its experts are now considering whether the changes in policy are likely to make that worse.
2. Costs to consumers
The claim: Sunak said people who disagreed with him must explain why they want families to have to pay an extra £5,000, £10,000 or £15,000.
It was unclear, but Sunak may have been referring to the cost of installing heat pumps over gas boilers. The average cost of installing heat pumps is coming down, however, something the prime minister acknowledged when he said the cost of transition was falling faster than anyone had thought.
Octopus Energy has just unveiled a heat pump for a three-bedroom home that would cost £3,000 after the government’s boiler upgrade grant. Octopus said that with the increase announced by Sunak of the boiler upgrade grant from £5,000 to £7,500, an average home could get a heat pump for as little as £500 – not a figure mentioned by Sunak.
Mark Maslin, a professor of climatology at University College London, said: “His excuse again and again … is not to put the cost burden on the public – as if it is individuals that have to pay for the net zero transition. The prime minister seems to forget that government is there to enable major infrastructure changes, and the switch to renewable energy, electric cars and heat exchangers should be supported because all of them in the long run save people money and improve people’s health.”
3. Taxes and compulsory behaviour change
The claim: Sunak said he was scrapping various proposals for encouraging behaviour change – “for government to interfere in how many passengers you can have in your car”; “that we should force you to have seven different bins in your home”; “to make you change your diet and harm British farmers by taxing meat”.
None of these have ever been government policies or been about to become government policies. Sunak appeared to claim on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday that the CCC had proposed a meat tax, but it has never proposed one. The committee has recommended a reduction of meat and dairy intake by 20% by 2030.
Sunak claimed he had scrapped rules requiring households to have seven bins for recycling. In 2021, new regulations said local authorities should arrange for collections of seven different types of waste – paper, plastic, metal, glass, non-recyclables, food waste and garden waste – but there were never plans for households to have a bin for each. The recyclable waste could still all go in one bin.
His own officials reassured stakeholders hours after Sunak’s speech, saying: “It was never the case that seven bins would be needed by households.”
Companies involved in car sharing said they were surprised that Sunak appeared to be scrapping a policy to force people to car share, because it did not exist. “It would appear that the prime minister has just killed a policy that no one knew they had,” said Julie Furnell, of Mobilityways.
4. Boilers
The claim: Sunak said households would never be forced to “rip out their existing boiler and replace it with a heat pump”.
Until Wednesday, there was a 2035 target to phase out the sale of gas boilers. It would not have forced people to rip out their boiler at that date and replace it, however. In reality, only those who needed to replace their boiler from 1 January 2035 would have had to replace it with a non-fossil fuel option.
Boilers often last about 15 years, so the 2035 date gives enough time for most boilers to be gone in time for net zero in 2050.
The phasing in of heat pumps allows consumers to stop relying on ever-more expensive gas, and encourages the industry to come up with cheaper and more efficient options. It also incentivises insulation, which enables heat pumps to work more effectively. When properly installed in a home with sufficient insulation, a heat pump is already cheaper to run today than running a gas boiler.
The policy to allow gas boilers to continue to be sold for longer ultimately benefits the fossil fuel industry rather than consumers.
5. Proportionate and pragmatic
The claim: Sunak said he was taking a middle road between “eco-zealots” who want to go further and faster on cutting emissions, and climate denialists who say there is no problem.
Sunak’s new stance does not appear so pragmatic when measured against the likely economic impacts. Although many carbon-cutting measures require upfront investment, the savings in efficiency, fossil fuels and from adopting more productive new technology can rapidly pay back the cost. There are also frequently “co-benefits” to green measures, which are harder to quantify, such as improvements in health and quality of life from eating less meat, cycling or walking more, and the cleaner air from taking more cars off the road.
For the UK to be economically successful, new business investment and new or upgraded infrastructure is constantly needed – so the question is not whether to invest at all, but whether to invest in clean and green ways of doing business, or in old high-carbon ways. The government can help with this by setting out regulations that private companies must follow. If it does not do so, British people may be stuck with high-carbon infrastructure in a future low-carbon world – for instance, with roads instead of public transport, air travel instead of high-speed trains, gas-fired boilers instead of modern heat pumps.
The Office for Budget Responsibility calculated in 2021 that the low-carbon investment needed to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would cost about £1.3tn in total. About £1tn of this will be offset by savings in fossil fuels and efficiency. The £300bn remaining, spread over 30 years, is now even less, the OBR said in its updated report in July, because of high gas prices – in fact, relying on gas for longer will now be more expensive than going low-carbon, it found.
Sunak, as a former chancellor of the exchequer, must have read the OBR reports, so the question is: if he is a pragmatist and economist, why is he failing to follow pragmatic economic advice?
