Treasury drops net zero commitment from its Green Book

The Treasury will not include a requirement on departments to explain how they will meet net zero emissions in its guidance for appraising government spending.

At a meeting of the Commons Public Accounts Committee yesterday (28 January), its chair Meg Hillier said the requirement had not been included during last year’s review of the Green Book because the Treasury assumed progress on cutting emissions would come through the “normal process” of vetting.

Steve Field, director, climate, environment, energy at the Treasury, said that guidance alongside the Green Book means that departments should consider greenhouse gas emissions when appraising projects and policies.

He said that as part of the lead up to last year’s spending review, the Treasury and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) had scrutinised departmental spending bids to check that they were in line with the government’s commitment to cut emissions to net zero by 2050.

However, not all departments are undertaking such assessments, Field said: “It is fair to say that is not always happening on a consistent basis. We need to do more to set expectations of departments.

“We did not get results from every department, and there is more that we can do to help departments working with BEIS, to ensure that they have the tools and capabilities to properly assess the climate impacts of their policies and plans at an early stage.”

He said the Treasury is taking stock of the last spending review and looking in detail at the returns it received from departments in a bid to “hopefully” get better results.

Field added that the Treasury is working with BEIS and the Climate Change Committee to develop measures to track progress on tackling climate change by departments.

Sarah Munby, permanent secretary at the BEIS department, said decisions by departments contribute to their individual envelopes of emissions, which they must take responsibility for.

“You are going to be found out if you don’t do the right things, because we measure that bucket of emissions over time and we can see what is happening,” she said, adding the caveat that the pace of decarbonisation would vary across departments as technological solutions are rolled out.

Julian Critchlow, director general of energy transformation and clean growth at BEIS, said the government is still planning to hold November’s COP26 summit in Glasgow as an in-person event in Glasgow, depending on progress on tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

He also defended the government’s handling of its Green Homes Grant (GHG) programme which has attracted widespread criticism over delays to the issuing of energy efficiency and low carbon heating vouchers.

Around 100,000 GHG vouchers are being processed “as fast as possible”, Critchlow said: “We have to ensure that quotes are high quality, value for money and that we are preventing fraud in the scheme.”

He added that the “vast majority” of applications for voucher had been accepted or rejected and the government is making “good progress” on those outstanding.