It is right to review climate law – but now the Tories must fill the void

The Conservatives have kicked off their party conference announcements early with new proposals to replace the Climate Change Act.  

Sam Hall | Director

It was welcome to see the party today recommitting to tackling climate change, and acknowledging that handing on a cleaner environment to future generations is a fundamentally conservative mission.

After all, climate action has been in the party’s DNA since Margaret Thatcher first raised the issue at the United Nations in 1989 – and it has formed an important, and popular, element of the party’s offer to voters.  

Climate change is one of the greatest threats we face to our country’s prosperity and security. If we do nothing, we face ever higher costs from flooding, retreating coastlines, poorer harvests, declining nature, and uninsurable assets. It is not something we can simply opt out of. The UK is only a tiny share of global emissions, but we can and should play an outsized role in addressing this challenge through leveraging our strengths in technology and finance. 

Reform’s approach of ignoring the threat and claiming there is nothing we can do, is both irresponsible and unserious. It is welcome the Conservatives have drawn a dividing line with them, which they should continue to press in the months ahead.  

Accepting the need to act on climate change doesn’t have to mean accepting the existing legal framework. The Climate Change Act has been in operation now for nearly 20 years, and we’ve seen its strengths and shortcomings. Since so much has changed domestically and internationally since the act’s passage, it is right to review the legislation.     

There is much to agree with in Kemi Badenoch’s critique of UK climate strategy to date.  

She is right about the scandal of high electricity prices, which are a disaster for electrification and decarbonisation. She is right about the overreliance on top-down, statist policies that restrict choice and toxify climate action which this Labour government is doubling down on. She is also right to reject solutions that deliver emissions savings on paper, such as shutting down industry or subsidising Drax’s biomass power station, but which emphatically do not deliver global climate benefits.  

Many of these were policy choices rather than inherent features of the act, but it is true the act has created some of the incentives that pushed ministers into making these decisions, and failed to afford ministers sufficient flexibility to avoid pursuing counterproductive measures. Furthermore, the way the act has been deployed by campaigners to tie ministers up in repeated legal cases over process or the minutiae of government documents did little to advance decarbonisation.    

To encourage others to go further and faster, UK climate leadership must not be abandoned, but reinvented in a more credible, conservative fashion. Claire and Kemi are right that lowering emissions isn’t sufficient on its own; we have to show that lower emissions go hand in hand with affordable bills, better living standards, and a growing economy. We should refocus our efforts on supporting a handful of breakthrough clean tech innovations that are affordable and that other countries want to buy from us. And we should definitely put more emphasis on the natural environment, which continues to decline.  

It is positive they have created space for a conversation about a more effective and more authentically conservative approach to climate action. But the party needs to fill the policy void which this announcement has created. To be taken seriously and to ultimately defeat the left’s statist approach, they need to quickly set out a credible alternative plan.  

They’ve been clear about backing new nuclear, which will be an essential part of our clean energy mix. This is a strong start. Similarly the push for cheap electricity will have substantial benefits for the switch to electric cars and heating. But there needs to be a suite of concrete policies on how we will reduce emissions, drive innovation in clean technology, restore nature, and adapt to warmer temperatures. 

The party cannot set ambitions like tackling climate change without having clear plans to achieve them. One of the main reasons the Climate Change Act was voted into law in the first place – including by nearly every Conservative MP at the time – was to prevent politicians making pledges to address climate change and then not following through.

For this reason, the party has an important opportunity, and a responsibility, to develop an alternative climate framework that would provide more flexibility to politicians, but also ensure accountability to voters and give confidence to the private sector.  

To be credible and honest with the public, we must be willing to make some trade-offs for climate action. At its core, the economic case for climate action is that we invest a smaller amount now in developing new technologies, restoring nature, and upgrading infrastructure to avoid much greater costs down the line for the sake of our children and grandchildren. It is hard to think of a more conservative principle than this. To be taking climate change seriously, we must be willing to bear some proportionate costs now to tackle it for future generations’ sake. 

While we can and should put more emphasis on nature, it would be ecologically incoherent to separate it from climate action. The problems are deeply interlinked – if you care about the fate of iconic British species like the Atlantic salmon or the puffin, our majestic native trees and woodlands, and the health of our green and pleasant land, then you need to be serious about climate change.  

With the twin ideological approaches of Labour and Reform, the Conservatives have an opportunity to occupy the common ground on climate change – acknowledging there’s a problem that we need to tackle, but solving it in a pragmatic, affordable, and market-led way. This would not only be popular with voters, but it would also provide clean energy investors with greater confidence about the political durability of the UK’s climate commitments. 

But to win over the public to their approach and show their alternative climate strategy is credible, the party must go beyond a press release and set out a full plan. I hope the policy review process will deliver this, and CEN looks forward to supporting and feeding in. 

First published by ConservativeHome. Sam Hall is Director of CEN.