Has Sunak set a net-zero trap for Starmer?

Rishi Sunak’s about-turn on key green policies has opened up a clear divide between Conservatives and Labour on one of the key issues of our time. Utility Week policy correspondent David Blackman asks a host of policy experts how they see the prime minister’s stance going down with voters and how the opposition is likely to respond.

We probably now know why Rishi Sunak didn’t make it to the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit last week. While deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden led the UK’s delegation to New York for the UN General Assembly side-event, his boss was in London plotting a climbdown on a string of the government’s key commitments for cutting emissions to net zero by 2050.

While the core pledge remained in place, Sunak’s 10 Downing Street speech last month saw the phase-out date for internal combustion engine cars and vans relaxed from 2030 to 2035, while around a fifth of households were exempted from the mid-2030s ban on new gas boilers.

In addition, moves to enforce more exacting energy efficiency standards on residential landlords have been abandoned.

According to Utility Week sources, civil servants at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) were taken aback like everyone else as Sunak was bounced into making his net-zero announcements on Wednesday (20 September) after the key changes were leaked to the BBC.

“Officials were working with the PM’s office on Tuesday night on this: that’s how last minute it was,” says one source.

“It was quite closely held in Number 10. It’s definitely quite a turnaround, particularly for the civil servants working on this. Everyone’s a bit shocked,” says Chris Friedler, policy manager (energy efficiency) at The Association for Decentralised Energy.

The whole statement was “very much rushed out,” says Mike Foster, chief executive of the Energy and Utilities Alliance.

Some CEOs of big companies affected by the announcement received phone calls from Sunak, Utility Week understands, but that is hardly likely to have entirely smoothed ruffled feathers.

Feelings are particularly raw about the prime minister’s relaxation of pressure on landlords around energy efficiency upgrades, compounded over the week by the scrapping of the taskforce set up only six months ago to spearhead action on the issue.

“Lots of very senior people were very, very pissed off about that – not unreasonably. They’ve given over a lot of time to something that was very, very quickly scrapped when it became obvious that it was going to be hard to do,” says Adam Bell, director of policy at consultancy Stonehaven.

On energy efficiency, Sunak’s wider professed commitment to keep down bills struck a “particularly cynical” note, given that the costs of such upgrades would have fallen on landlords and saved tenants money.

Dr Richard Lowes, senior associate at The Regulatory Assistance Project thinktank, says: “It’s small amounts of money for landlords and potentially huge impacts on bills.”

This aspect of the announcement wasn’t “smart politics”, says ex-Labour MP Foster: “On energy efficiency, Joe Public would very much support measures that don’t cost the consumer and tenants anything and gives people a warmer home that’s cheaper to heat.”

This undermined Sunak’s wider message, which was chiefly designed to set up dividing lines on net-zero policy with the Labour opposition by portraying the Conservatives as the pragmatic party that will cut emissions without overloading consumers with unnecessary costs.

“Sunak is going to try his best to put a wedge between the two so you can see more of a divergence between the two parties. The government is hoping to unlock support from those who are worried about some of the (net zero) interventions,” says Josh Buckland, an adviser on energy and environment in Theresa May’s government, who is now a director of the public affairs at consultancy Flint Global.

“It was a very political statement. Some of the rhetoric seem to address net-zero straw men rather than real policy dilemmas,” says Foster, pointing to subsequently mocked announcements by Sunak that he was scrapping policies that had never even been officially proposed, such as compulsory car sharing.

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