Tories backtracking on climate change, warns former top aide

Prime Minister Liz Truss’ comments dismissing solar panels as “paraphernalia” indicate that the Conservative Party has slipped back on taking climate change seriously, her predecessor David Cameron’s director of policy has said.

At a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, Baroness Cavendish said she was “really worried” about the Tories’ direction of travel on net zero issues.

During the leadership campaign, Truss expressed opposition to the rollout of solar farms on agricultural land, while her subsequent appointment of Jacob Rees-Mogg as business and energy secretary of state has sparked concerns that the government has backtracked on the environment.

She said: “I spent many years trying to convince the Conservative Party that climate change was real. I thought we had probably got to a point where that just seemed to be so bloody obvious that people were coming around to it. I fear when you have a prime minister who has recently called solar panels paraphernalia we are moving away from that again.

“We have a diminishing number of zealots running this country, who for some unknown reason think that energy efficiency is still somehow embarrassing or kind of Stalinist.”

“We need to scale up our ambition,” Cavendish said, noting that despite some good initiatives, the UK’s take up of heat pumps is “tiny” compared with Finland, where a third of homes have had the devices fitted.

While hailing the recently announced energy support package as the “biggest intervention” ever introduced by any government, she expressed disappointment that it had not been better targeted.

Cavendish said: “It does not include properly targeted measures so that the richest 10% of people, who by the way use 20 times more energy than the poorest 10%, are actually going to reduce their demand. I think that is an enormous missed opportunity because that’s where the low-hanging fruit is.”

At another meeting, climate minister of state Graham Stuart insisted that the government remains committed to tackling climate change and that the recently announced Net Zero Review is focused on how to achieve the 2050 target rather than rethinking it.

He said: “The Prime Minister and the secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) have both been clear on our commitment to net zero.

“That commitment and the legal framework is in place. My appointment suggests again a commitment to that.

“We’re not reviewing net zero, we’re simply looking at making sure that we’re doing it the right way. There’s absolutely no question of reviewing net zero.”

Delivering net zero in a “business friendly, prosperity friendly and constituency friendly” manner is a sensible way of holding together a powerful coalition of support within the Tory party for the 2050 goal, Stuart said: “We have within his party and across the country committed to net zero. This is not a review of whether we’re going to the net zero, which is set out in law, and shouldn’t be questioned.”

Benet Northcote, deputy chair of the Conservative Environment Network, said that the 100 plus MPs who are members of the group showed the strength of support for the net zero goal within the Tory party.

The path to net zero will be a key theme at the Utility Week Forum on 8-9 November in London. Find out more here.