How did the Climate Change Act happen?
Eight key ingredients made a recipe for legislative and political success. Two have recently become less potent.
“There was this widely-held belief that putting a limit on carbon could only be damaging economically,” Baroness Bryony Worthington tells me in Episode 7 of the Political Heat podcast. “And of course the reality is, if you change the rules of the game, businesses adapt, new businesses are formed, and there’s economic opportunity that emerges. Especially with climate, where you’re replacing a very inefficient system of fossil fuels with a much more efficient system of clean electricity.”
The Climate Change Act has become part of the furniture of UK policymaking. It was a world-first, providing the framework for emissions reductions across the entire economy. And it created the independent Committee on Climate Change to advise the UK and devolved governments on - crucially - the cost-effective pathway to achieving climate goals. Displaying a unity of purpose that feels unfamiliar today, MPs from across the House of Commons voted it into law. Only five voted against.
But, as the above quote suggests, it wasn’t inevitable. Why did it happen when it did, back in 2008? And what lessons are relevant today? On the podcast I hear the story from Bryony, who led the campaign for the Act and then drafted the Bill while seconded into Defra, the environment department. Amidst anecdotes from the last years of New Labour, eight key ingredients emerge in a recipe for legislative and political success.
Eight key ingredients
One. There was a clear threat. Scientists had long since established the physical facts: our planet was warming at an alarming rate; the cause was greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity; and impacts were already visible and projected to get far worse. This was all periodically synthesised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in weighty assessment reports.
Two. A landmark report commissioned by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, made an unarguable economic case. The Stern Review of 2006 concluded that the costs of inaction outweighed the costs of action. It also noted that “a range of options exists to cut emissions; strong, deliberate policy action is required to motivate their take-up.”
Three. The international community had adopted the Kyoto Protocol, which the Labour government saw over the line shortly after coming to power in 1997. This not only set binding emissions targets on industrialised countries. It also provided a methodical, science-based and accountable technique - the idea of a carbon budget - which the UK’s Climate Change Act borrowed and improved upon.
Four. Emissions targets weren’t new to the UK, but until the Act they hadn’t been economy-wide or long-term. The innovation was to enshrine them in legislation and to constrain emissions right the way through to 2050. This was the visionary yet practical idea that Bryony had. As she explains, for this “multi-decade-long challenge … what you need is a series of budgets, where if you exceed one, the second is tightened to reflect your failures.”
Five. Friends of the Earth ran a bloody good campaign! The Big Ask mobilised 200,000 people to write to their MPs, in an outpouring of public support for the Bill. It also partnered with celebs, including Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, and benefited from coverage on the front pages of national newspapers. The campaign succeeded in persuading the government to include a Climate Change Bill in the 2006 Queen’s Speech. Tireless parliamentary advocacy then resulted in an amendment to increase the Bill’s 2050 target from 60% to 80%.
Six. The business lobby was supportive. “I think we were very lucky,” admits Bryony. “We had a very good leader in the CBI in those years. And because we drafted something which was framework legislation, it wasn't picking winners … essentially business would decide the exact activities, by and large. That was something they were very comfortable with.”
Seven. The cross-party consensus on climate ran deep. Former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave a passionate address to the UN on the topic back in 1989. And, in the months leading up to the Labour government's decision to introduce the Bill, David Cameron lent his support. As Leader of the Opposition at the time, he said politicians needed to work together on the biggest challenge facing the world.
Eight. Key politicians showed committed, and at times courageous, leadership. Defra ministers saw the potential in Friends of the Earth’s idea and drove it forwards. Bryony name-checks Elliot Morley (who “read our slightly left-field submission and liked it and actually called us in for meetings”) and David Miliband (“things really started to motor” once he became Secretary of State).
But not all departments were convinced. This part of the story is worth quoting at length:
“You had Department for Industry, you had Department of Transport, you had the Treasury, obviously, always have the Treasury. So they all came at this with different perspectives about what their mission was for the economy.
“The biggest fight we had was, why should the UK do this when we are only 2% of global emissions and no one else is doing anything? Why should we volunteer ourselves into a constraint on our economy that will damage our competitiveness?
“And really the only answer was, we’ll do it because it’s morally correct to do it. Leadership is about doing what’s right. We are the home of the Industrial Revolution and unwittingly we launched this problem into the world and it’s absolutely right that we are the country that steps up and takes a lead to fix it. And if we do so, then there will be a race to the top where others will follow, and if we don’t do it, we’re all giving up. It was a bit of an assertion that others would follow, but actually others have.”
Ultimately, says Bryony, “Blair and Brown, between them, had to resolve those conflicts at Cabinet level.” Choosing to push ahead with the Bill took some political bravery. Despite the long-term economic case that Stern had set out, many of the short-term benefits of emissions reductions were yet to be proven.
Cracks in the consensus?
Since the Bill became an Act, almost all the above ingredients have stayed in the mix. Most have become more potent. Scientists predict widespread devastation if climate change is left unchecked. The Paris Agreement of 2015 brought all nations together to tackle climate change, not just the industrialised economies. In 2019, Theresa May’s government strengthened the 2050 target to net zero, again with cross-party support.
More recently, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimated the costs of continuing to rely on fossil gas would be double the cost of meeting our net zero target. The CBI this year urged the government to “focus on delivery, and fast” in the global race to net zero. And the climate is a consistent concern for the British public.
So it’s unfortunate that the late-noughties debate in Blair’s Cabinet resonates once again. There are, as before, senior politicians arguing that the UK is insignificant and therefore shouldn’t bother, or that climate action is somehow a sacrifice. That’s despite evidence of the impact that the UK has had on international efforts to reduce emissions, and the manifest economic benefits of clean tech.
As the current Parliament entered its final months, the cross-party climate consensus began to look fragile. There was a shift in tone from the Prime Minister, accompanied by some backtracking on policy. As the election campaign got underway, the Conservatives doubled down on their lukewarm stance - seemingly unnerved by the prospect of losing some of their few remaining supporters to the climate-sceptic Reform Party. In a purely political move, the Conservatives promised to force the Committee on Climate Change to account for household costs and energy security. In fact, that remit is already plain for everyone to see in the Climate Change Act.
Leadership for the long term
With so much at stake for both the environment and the economy, such politicking is unquestionably a failure of leadership. Even though the Conservatives say they support the net zero goal, and there are sizeable similarities with Labour’s position on specific policies, the negative rhetoric matters. It signals confusion to investors. And, combined with a slowing of progress in the past couple of years, it indicates a reluctance to press on with delivery for the rest of this crucial decade.
It matters even though polls predict Labour will win the election. Even a government more positive about climate action will at times find it difficult to do the right thing. It makes a difference when the official Opposition is trying to raise the bar rather than lower it - look at the impact of Cameron’s support for a Climate Change Bill. And, as Bryony put it, climate is a “multi-decade-long challenge”. So far, cross-party consensus has kept climate ambition relatively high through changes in government, and that has been a major factor in establishing the UK's international standing on the issue.
It was a genius move to make the Climate Change Act a piece of framework legislation, building in the flexibility to adapt to changing economic conditions and technologies. But it means the politics have to adapt as well. We will always need agile leadership and the ongoing forging of consensus, to make new policies possible as times change.
Whichever party wins the election, the next government will have to put together a new climate plan, due to a recent lawsuit. A better plan is necessary, but not sufficient. Grit and energy will be needed to translate words into action. It’s political will that’ll determine whether the UK can fulfil the promise of the Climate Change Act.
Coda
I was in my late teens at the time of the Big Ask campaign. I remember coming across some activists running a street stall; cheery faces, leaflets flapping in the breeze. Anxious about what we were doing to our planet, I didn’t need much encouragement to add my name. It made me hopeful, for the first time, that there might be a way to get to grips with climate change after all. Perhaps governments did have the tools they needed to respond.
Looking back now, I’m grateful to those activists for involving me in the Act’s beginnings. It was an historic moment. Perhaps it was even a geological moment. If that sounds too dramatic, consider that this piece of legislation is driving the UK's emissions down towards net zero. It created international momentum and a model for other countries to copy. If the world succeeds in eliminating humanity’s contribution to rising global temperatures, the Climate Change Act will be one of the reasons why.
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Listen to the full interview with Baroness Bryony Worthington wherever you get your podcasts. Find it here.