The UK government has announced its business department will be split into separate departments for science, business and energy. The new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, to give it its full name, represents the return of an energy and climate-focused department after a seven-year hiatus.
When then-prime minister Theresa May disbanded the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) in 2016, in order to create the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), it was widely criticised as a signal that climate change was being downgraded in importance. Looking back over BEIS’s few years in existence, this was not necessarily the case.
