Lord Deben: Politicians have finally grasped the reality of climate change

The chair of the Committee on Climate Change discusses how the climate emergency eventually sunk in for the country's leadership and how, if they fail, he will see them in court.

For someone who didn’t leave the House of Lords until 2am, Lord Deben looks surprisingly fresh-faced when we meet later that morning.

The Tory peer was in Parliament’s upper house into the wee small hours supporting the ultimately successful legislation designed to prevent the UK exiting the EU at the end of next month without a deal.

As a member of the rapidly diminishing breed of Europhile Tories, the 79-year-old peer is clearly delighted with how the previous night’s events panned out.

“Leaving the EU is a great mistake and the fundamental reason is that it is to abjure the only way we are going to solve so many of our biggest problems, which is to work with our neighbours,” he says.

But we’re not at the Georgian offices of Lord Deben’s company Sancroft, which advises on environmental issues, to talk about Brexit. Instead, we are here to discuss his work as chair of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which has chalked up some big wins over the past three months.

The biggest of these was the government’s acceptance of its advisory body’s recommendation that the UK should adopt a target of net zero emissions by 2050.

Lord Deben is no fly-by-night environmentalist. He probably remains best remembered for the time when as secretary of state for agriculture, the yet to be ennobled John Selwyn Gummer fed his young daughter burgers on TV during the BSE crisis to demonstrate his faith that British beef was safe.

But his time as a stalwart of the Conservative ­cabinets of the 1990s also included a four-year spell as secretary of state for the environment. After being ejected from office at the 1997 general election, Gummer proved his commitment to tackling climate change by accompanying his replacement, Labour’s John Prescott, to the climate change talks in Kyoto.

Gummer left the House of Commons in 2010 and entered the upper house. In 2012 he was invited by then prime minister David Cameron to become the CCC’s second chair.

While politics may be in turmoil, the ebullient Tory peer and Utility Week New Deal for Utilities panellist is “more confident” now than when he took on the job about the UK’s commitment to tackling climate change.

Having met ministers, he is “convinced” that they are determined to produce a net zero “package that works”.

“The government itself is clearly committed and indeed legislatively committed to meeting its [carbon] budgets, which means it will have to make serious changes.

“If they don’t, they will be taken to court and I will be witness for the prosecution, which would not be good for the government.”

The foundations of this optimism are the consensus, even on the traditionally climate change sceptic right wing of the Conservative party, about the importance of tackling the issue.

Another straw in the wind was the overwhelming support for adopting the net zero target among the ­candidates for the Conservative party leadership.

“They grasped we have to deal with the environment. They have grasped the reality of climate change.”

They included Boris Johnson, whom Lord Deben is prepared to give the benefit of the doubt on ­environmental issues.

“In so far as the prime minister has consistently strong views, he has them on the environment.

“His reaction to the fires in Brazil was stronger and tougher than it needed to be for his own purposes,” he says, noting the track record of Johnson’s father ­Stanley as a committed environmentalist.

“I can genuinely say it doesn’t matter to our ­programme on climate change who is in government, which I’m not sure was always true. The consensus is stronger today than it was.

“The concern is not about commitment, that is now an all-party thing,” says Lord Deben, adding that these days he is rarely questioned in public about whether climate change is happening.

“The increasing understanding of people about climate change is very noticeable and the government has picked that up. It would be impossible now for a government to turn its back on what we are doing on climate change – not just because legislatively it can’t, but because politically it can’t. I’m not sure if that was true five years ago.”

Lord Deben, whose establishment credentials include a spell on the General Synod of the Church of England (although he converted to Catholicism in 1992), pays ­tribute to the radical end of the environmental ­movement for this change of mood on the issue.

“The efforts of Greta Thunberg and the children and Extinction Rebellion are really valuable because what they have done is ­concentrate people’s minds.”

Another factor is that the problem of climate change is becoming harder to sidestep, he says: “The thing about climate change is that every year it gets worse. We don’t want it to be true but every year it becomes more obvious that it is happening.”

But the debate has shifted onto what is the most ­cost-effective way of curbing emissions.

The problem now though is lack of time to deal with the issue because of the way that Brexit has crowded out other policy areas, he says: “They don’t have detailed policies because they haven’t got to that stage. I’m more worried about people’s appreciation of the speed with which they have to act.”

This focus on short-term pressure could be exemplified by the one-year spending review presented by chancellor of the exchequer Sajid Javid a fortnight ago.

There was widespread disappointment among environmentalists about the slim pickings on offer for efforts to mitigate climate change so soon after June’s adoption of the headline net zero target.

“It was a series of promises to put large sums of money into areas where the public feels money has been starved but not much more detail because he [Javid] hasn’t had the time because what he is really doing is thinking about Brexit,” says Lord Deben.

On the other hand though, the government’s success in landing next year’s high-profile COP26 climate change conference puts pressure on ministers to act, he says: “We are going to have to show what we have done.”

And there’s a lot of work to be done, with Lord Deben identifying energy efficiency as the “biggest ­challenge” facing the government on climate change and ­“absolutely central” to tackling the issue.

“Energy efficiency is always the poor relation, but it is the quickest and easiest way to reduce emissions,” he says, adding that there is “no excuse” for new energy-inefficient homes to be built.

“We are building crap housing we are going to have to adapt,” he says, adding that he sees “no reason” for not insisting on raising the standards to the level of the Passivhaus voluntary building performance standard pioneered in Germany.

He is particularly excited by a home-grown version of the virtually zero carbon standard, which is being launched by the UK housing association Hastoe this month. “If it’s as good as I think it will be, there is no reason why it can’t be adopted very urgently.”

And he wants to change the planning rules so that the building regulations that apply to a new property aren’t those in place when consent was granted but when it is actually built.

In practical terms, this would mean that the government’s ban on fossil fuel heating in new homes from 2025, announced at the last Budget, would kick in from that date rather than potentially several years later.

The big hurdle here though are the volume housebuilders that dominate the UK new homes market, says Lord Deben, whose remit as environment secretary covered housing and planning.

“You can build better houses without increasing prices because the house price isn’t fixed by the cost of building, it’s fixed by the level of price that the builder thinks he can get.”

In practice, any extra costs for meeting higher energy efficiency costs would come out of the value of the land, he says: “The real reason they [housebuilders] don’t want to do it is that most of the major housebuilders have got large land banks for which they have paid money and not taken this into account. I’m afraid it’s something they will have to absorb.

“You can do that without having an increase in the price of housing.”

Lord Deben’s former constituency in Suffolk ­covers EDF’s nuclear plant at Sizewell, which the French ­company wants to replace.

While insisting that he is not opposed to nuclear, which remains a “necessary part of the mix”, he is sceptical about the government’s proposals for applying the regulated asset base mechanism to help finance new projects. “We have to have the same scepticism about costs because in the end the public are going to have to pay for this.

“EDF are still quoting figures that are frankly not competitive in today’s world and also figures that one isn’t sure will be met.

“Like HS2, there’s no harm in having a very close look at the figures, there may be other ways of doing this.”

And he says nuclear is a “transitional” power source.

“By the time you get to the need for the next nuclear power stations, there will be alternative ways of doing this. If we get better at balancing the grid and the amount of baseload energy, the need becomes smaller.

“Nuclear isn’t the best way of getting that base energy because you can’t turn it on and off: you have to use it all the time.

“If you are really concerned about what happens when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, you install in people’s homes hybrid boilers that can run on electricity or gas.”

These hybrid boilers, which were championed in the CCC’s report on heating at the end of last year, would run off electricity, apart from during periods of peak demand.

“Whereas somebody would have required a boiler 100 per cent of the time, they would use it 3 per cent of the time but that 3 per cent would be when the nation needs it. You can have back-up with a million boilers rather than build two new nuclear power stations.”

In the short term, even though Westminster is in turmoil, Lord Deben is planning to meet every secretary of state to see what net zero will mean for their departments. This will in turn inform a report next year, which will put the whole of Whitehall under the climate change microscope for the first time.

“For the first time, we will be saying what ought to have happened and what has happened for each department. You concentrate people’s minds by making sure they know what they are supposed to be doing so it’s not surprising they do it because the world will know.”

As an example, he points to the Department for Transport, whose target to ban internal combustion engine cars and vans by 2040 is insufficiently ambitious, according to the CCC.

“The reality is the law is clear and they have to deliver: although they don’t have to deliver to our programme, they have to deliver to our targets. If they can’t do it with electric vehicles, they will have to come up with an alternative.”

And with that, Lord Deben makes his apologies and leaves to resume battle over Brexit in the House of Lords.