‘PM should lead Covid-style press briefings on climate fight’

Boris Johnson should run No 10 Downing Street coronavirus crisis-style press briefings to ram home the importance of the message on tackling climate change, the chair of the BEIS select committee has urged.

Speaking on a panel at the Institute for Government thinktank’s net zero conference, Darren Jones was quizzed on the lessons from the government’s response to Covid-19 for dealing with climate change.

The Labour MP said that while many aspects of the government’s response to the pandemic had been found wanting, its communication strategy during the pandemic provided useful tips.

“The prime minister could lead press conference from No 10 on the climate emergency we are facing.

“It may be symbolically important but it’s important that it’s not just an energy minister and something that will cut through with the public.

“We’ve seen great communication on promoting the vaccine: some of that in the future on decarbonisation would be a good lesson from the pandemic.”

But the government cannot rely on top-down efforts to tackle climate change from Whitehall and has to find ways to engage with communities about the issues, Jones said: “There is further work to do in local communities about how it is going to roll out in your neck of the woods.”

He added that suppliers and district network operators should be mobilised to establish a dialogue with members of the public about the new local carbon technologies for replacing gas boilers.

“We need to start working through suppliers and infrastructure providers as well as local authorities to get things through letter boxes and to have actual conversations with them.

“If people start to see bills increasing without explanation of why that is happening, you are quickly going to turn people off,” he said, adding that the risk of a backlash is particularly heightened around heat because the public has a relatively limited understanding of its contribution to rising emissions.

Speaking at the same session, Climate Change Committee chief executive Chris Stark said his body has calculated that the costs of decarbonisation are relatively affordable across the economy.

But this masked “more difficult questions” about how the costs and the benefits of the transition to net zero are allocated fairly with some sectors such as buildings and industry likely to be more expensive to decarbonise than others, he said: “It won’t happen unless we have a big public discussion.

“You can’t hide that from the public.”