Bill payers must back low carbon transition, believes new climate change minister

Climate change is among “most serious threats that we face”

The government’s newly appointed climate change minister has backed bill payer subsidies for the shift to low carbon power generation.

Claire Perry was appointed climate change minister yesterday following Nick Hurd’s move to the Home Office as Theresa May continued her post-election reshuffle of the Cabinet.

The government announced yesterday (June 12) that Perry, who is MP for the Wiltshire constituency of Devizes, is joining the BEIS (business, energy and industrial strategy) department as minister of state for climate change.

Perry was a junior minister at the parliamentary under secretary for transport until July last year before quitting over the government’s failure to stop disruption on the Southern Rail franchise.

In a blogpost, published in February last year, Perry backed the inclusion of an “ambitious set of targets” in the fifth carbon budget, prior to its adoption in July.

To achieve those targets, she wrote that it was “only fair to expect bill payers to support low carbon power as long as costs are controlled”.

Perry described climate change as “one of the most serious threats that we face” and that “greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the dominant cause”.

Referring to the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, she wrote that she was “glad” that the UK was “taking a leading role on the world stage, working towards a binding global deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Perry joins a team headed by Greg Clark, who was reappointed secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) by the prime minister on Sunday.  

Following his Home Office appointment, Hurd tweeted that he had been “proud” to work on the government’s measures to tackle climate change and on its industrial strategy, during his time at BEIS.