Have cake, will eat. For years it has been the default political response to awkward questions about the climate crisis, with successive governments insisting that going green would create jobs, not destroy them, and that the planet could be saved without stifling growth or demanding uncomfortable sacrifices. Keir Starmer promised only this month not to “tell people how to live their lives”, suggesting the road to net zero would not be quite as painful as some think. And then, this week, he hit a pothole.
The carmaker Stellantis, which owns Vauxhall, announced it was closing its van factory in Luton, putting 1,100 jobs at risk; its rival Ford is axing 800 jobs. In Sunderland, Nissan has warned of an industry at “crisis point”.
All are blaming rules introduced by the outgoing Conservative government, under which manufacturers will be fined if they don’t meet annual targets for ramping up sales of electric cars even though demand is waning. Though it may be true that nobody is going to have a job if the planet fries to an uninhabitable crisp, the promise of a brighter future for your grandchildren doesn’t make a P45 before Christmas any less of a punch in the guts.
This is the first really serious test of nerve for a Labour government that is genuinely committed to net zero, but anxious about the human consequences of job losses in its old industrial heartlands and increasingly fearful of provoking the kind of backlash against green policies that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK could easily exploit. Ministers shouldn’t panic and throw the net zero baby out with the bathwater, but they’re right to recognise that the water is getting increasingly murky.
Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, grew up on Wearside in the kind of town where everyone knows someone who works at Nissan. He lost no time announcing an urgent review of the last government’s zero-emission vehicles (ZEV) mandate, whose ever-ratcheting annual sales targets were meant to pave the way for ending petrol and diesel car sales for good in 2035. What it didn’t do, crucially, was acknowledge how many drivers simply wouldn’t be able to afford new cars in the middle of a cost of living crisis.
If the ZEV mandate was meant to put a rocket up the industry, it has worked. Bestselling models such as the much-loved Ford Fiesta and VW Golf have been quietly killed off, because the more cheap petrol cars you sell, the harder it is to sell enough electric ones to meet the mandate. (Though they’re often cheaper to run long-term, electric cars tend to be more expensive upfront.)
Meanwhile, all the fuss over Jaguar’s new rebrand, featuring wackily dressed models and lots of woo-woo about “delete ordinary”, disguises a hard-headed commercial decision: late to the electric party, Jaguar has had to reinvent itself dramatically, ditching petrol models and relaunching in 2026 as an electric-only boutique brand for the global rich. It’s going not woke, but bespoke – and if that doesn’t work, possibly also broke.
All this plus some panicky last-minute discounting and creative use of loopholes (which may be widened by ministers) means that this year’s target for 22% of car sales to be electric should just about be met. But in 2027 that target leaps to 38%, and to 80% by 2030. If demand doesn’t rise to match, then manufacturers could be forced to choose between selling electric cars at an unsustainable loss, or halting production partway through the year and sending workers home so they don’t overproduce petrol and diesel cars they might get fined for selling.
The threat nobody is quite spelling out yet is that if selling cars in Britain gets too hard, ultimately there’s no obvious reason to make them here either. Why not just shift production overseas to wherever the rules are looser, and save the post-Brexit hassle of exporting them? Meanwhile, from the planet’s point of view, every lost electric sale is a missed opportunity to transition faster.
Reynolds and the [then] transport secretary, Louise Haigh, are said to be lobbying privately not for watering down the targets, but for more financial incentives to buy electric cars. In Norway, the world leader in switching to zero-emission cars, generous tax breaks tempt drivers to make the leap. Joe Biden introduced tax credits for buying electric (though inevitably Donald Trump is threatening to scrap them) and Germany is proposing something similar.
But in Britain, the last government tried to make the transition on the cheap, ignoring warnings that doing so would end in precisely the scenario now unfolding. Once again, it’s the incoming government lumbered with sorting out the mess.
The truth is that like all big industrial transitions, the shift to green was never going to be without pain. New jobs will be created, but not always in the towns where fossil-fuel industry jobs are dying. Not every worker made redundant in late middle-age is going to happily retrain as a windfarm engineer. Not everything in life is going to be the same as it was, and change always has the potential to be politically explosive. Softening the edges of it, for the places and people who always seem to end up on the sharp end, won’t be cheap. But neither, as you would think we might have learned by now, is picking up the pieces of lives left behind.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
• After this article was scheduled for publication on 29 November 2024, Louise Haigh resigned as transport secretary.
