In 2013 I published an article called “The political sustainability of climate policy: The case of the UK Climate Change Act.” I concluded that the political future of the Act was uncertain. For many years that seemed unduly pessimistic, and both the Act and the Climate Change Committee that it created were held up as models for other countries, many of which adopted at least superficially similar legislation. Through the political turmoil of the post-Brexit years, the consensus in favour of the Act seemed to hold.
That consensus began to erode under Rishi Sunak, and today Kemi Badenoch announced that that a Conservative government would repeal the Act. Reform have already said they would scrap the net zero target that is enshrined in the 2019 amendment of the Act and which was endorsed by the CCC. Parties collectively polling at 48% of the vote, one of which may well win the next election, are now an existential threat to the Act.
Why is this? Why is it that a model that appeared to work so well for so long is now facing such headwinds?
The 2013 article framed the challenge for the Act as one of policy feedback, i.e., the need for a policy to itself create effects that would strengthen political support for the continuation of the policy, and to avoid creating ‘negative feedback’ that would strengthen opponents.
One problem was that the design of the Act and the nature of its key institution, the CCC, were primarily technocratic. Some commentators, seeing political consensus on climate through the 2010s and early 2020s, took the view that the Act underpinnned and helped create and maintain this consensus. However, I have always see the relationship as the other way round; it was the consensus on climate change up to 2023 that meant that challenges to Act were relatively minor, making it look more robust than it was.
In fact, technocratic bodies are always reliant on external constituencies to defend them, as Adam Posen points out in the case of central banks (also increasingly under attack):
The only way that central banks can credibly commit to price stability over the long-term is to maintain a political constituency in civil society supportive of such a policy regime. That support from civil society, not any legal statute, is what protects central banks when they make a hard decision that angers politicians. Absent that support, laws regarding central banks can be changed or threatened to be changed until monetary policy is changed. Central bank independence is endogenous to that support, and it will be curtailed when such support is lost.
The same is very much the case with the CCC and the Act itself.
So what have been the policy feedback effects in play over the last 17 years since the Act was passed?
On the negative side, what appears to be a negative interpretive effect – whereby the stance a politician or a member of the public takes in relation to an issue becomes bound up closely with their political identity – seems to have strengthened.
In my 2013 analysis, I noted that despite the apparent consensus at the time the Act was passed, with only a handful of votes against, this masked dissent on the backbenches of the Conservative party. A survey of Tory MPs in July 2008 indicated that one third of Conservative MPs were not convinced about man-made climate change. A survey of 141 prospective parliamentary candidates in January 2010 found that they collectively ranked reducing Britain’s carbon footprint as the lowest out of 19 policy priorities. The late 2000s and early 2010s saw increasing resistance to onshore wind energy in primarily Conservative-voting rural areas, leading to pressure on MPs, 100 of whom wrote to the then Prime Minister David Cameron in 2012 demanding an end to the programme (which followed in 2016). The pressure on the Conservatives to move away from consensus increased with the rise of UKIP on the right through the middle of the decade. For a while, in the wake of the Brexit vote, this pressure went away, but of course has now reappeared far more strongly with the rise of Reform. Reform is an authoritarian, socially conservative and nationalist populist party, and it now well-documented that such parties are hostile to the climate agenda, primarily on ideological grounds. Climate change is seen by populists as a cosmopolitan, liberal concern that has captured the elite and which imposes costs on the people. The Conservatives had already moved to the right with the expulsion or loss of more moderate one nation Tories in 2019, but in recent years have moved further towards more populist positions in a (so far ineffective) attempt to stave off the challenge on the right.
It is true that on the political centre and left, amongst the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats, Greens and the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, the commitment to climate policy remains strong, and if anything has also strengthened over the last 17 years as the impacts of climate change have become clearer. But it remains the case that there is a real possibility that the next election might be won by Reform outright, or possibly by a coalition of Reform and the Conservatives. To survive under these circumstances, the Act will have needed to generate some strong positive feedback effects. The most important of these are probably the creation of jobs and investment through climate policy, and a move to cheaper energy, and for both of these effects to generate political constituencies which will be able to stave off attempts to axe the Act.
Both government – see Ed Miliband’s recent speech at the Labour party conference – and business – see the response of Rain Newton-Smith of the CBI on the Tory announcement – use the jobs and investment argument. It is potentially powerful, but go beneath the headlines and the picture is a bit more complex and mixed. There are some areas (for example offshore wind in Humberside) where new jobs easily linkable to climate policy are very visible. But more broadly, the effects of decarbonization will largely be to ‘green’ existing jobs, rather than the ending of ‘brown’ jobs and the creation of new ‘green’ jobs. There is also a tendency to focus on manufacturing jobs, but there are some issues with this in a UK context. Manufacturing has become increasingly automated in the last few decades, and now provides relatively few, albeit higher skilled and higher paid jobs. The UK is overwhelmingly a service economy – we are not Germany. Perhaps particularly important for a political defense of the Act, trade unions are somewhat ambivalent on the issue of green jobs. Unions are broadly supportive of the transition in principle, but point out, rightly, that new green jobs tend to be less unionized and have worse working conditions than the old high-carbon jobs (for example in the switch from offshore working in oil and gas to wind).
The other potential important area of positive feedback is the cost of energy, and in particular electricity. The UK has been a success story for the ending of coal-fired power generation and the rise of renewables, especially solar and wind. Supporters of climate policy will rightly say that the costs of these new forms of electricity generation are now cheaper than fossil fuels. However, this was not always the case and electricity consumers (especially households and small businesses as some large energy intensive industries are exempt) are still carrying the legacy costs of a major subsidy programme in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time, the lower costs of renewables do not yet fully benefit those consumers because of the design of wholesale electricity markets. This design means that despite the spread of renewables, gas-fired power generation still sets the price for a large proportion of the time. The current government’s clean power plan may eventually lead to big savings on bills (£300 a year has been promised), this will probably not happen until the early-mid 2030s, and in the meantime, the price cap for consumers has actually gone up in the last year.
What is the overall lesson here? First, that while building institutional and legislative structures around climate change is important, policy has to lean into the politics. A Climate Change Act is insufficient on its own, as it is does not insulate you against political change. The advice of the CCC is merely advice (with only a rather fragile requirement by government to report to Parliament on progress or lack thereof). In the end, like all other climate policy, it’s only as good as the political consensus on climate change. Moreover, the technocratic nature of the Act and the Committee has meant that insufficient attention has been given to the strengthening that consensus through policy feedback. As long as right wing populism remained under the surface of British politics, this was less of a problem, but this situation also masked a weakness in the absence of strong positive policy feedback effects.
There are now two urgent and important tasks needed to address this situation. First, build a much stronger political coalition around the jobs and investment benefits of climate policy, which can be done only by bringing unions on board and hence addressing their concerns. Second, by doing something to cut electricity bills in the short-term, and visibly presenting this as a glide path to permanently low bills in a new low carbon world. Without doing these, the risk is that the Climate Change Act will not survive into the next decade.
Follow Sussex Energy Group
