ULEZ if you want to: How far will Tories turn on net zero?

The emergence of London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) as a dividing line in a key by-election has ignited the debate about whether the Conservative Party is going cool on climate change. David Blackman examines whether the government is losing faith in the net-zero journey.

In a month when the UN secretary general declared that the world had entered a new era of “global boiling”, there has been heated debate in Westminster about the pace and scale of the drive to cut the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The issue is again dominating the headlines at the start of this week as the prime minister pledged his support for fresh oil and gas drilling licences in the North Sea, alongside carbon capture and storage clusters.

It followed a series of media appearances over the weekend in which Rishi Sunak appeared to temper the government’s recent zeal for green measures, instead highlighting the importance of individual choice.

The latest bout of climate policy soul searching was triggered by the by-election for the seat of Uxbridge, which the Conservatives managed to cling onto after turning the poll for Boris Johnson’s old constituency into a referendum on London mayor Sadiq Khan’s controversial extension of the capital’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ)

The ULEZ, despite containing the word emissions, is primarily designed to tackle air quality and not climate change, but the backlash against it has rallied net-zero sceptics within the Tory party.

They have seized on the result to make a case that a less eco-friendly stance could offer a way for the Conservatives to save the next general election.

Like ULEZ, which will force many outer London households to scrap their polluting vehicles, the upcoming steps on the road to net zero will be increasingly intrusive.

If the UK is to have any hope of meeting its emissions reduction targets, the next decade will see increasing numbers of households being pushed to swap their combustion engine cars and gas boilers for electric vehicles and heat pumps.

Michael Gove, secretary of state for levelling up, has already signalled that the government will delay the introduction of higher energy efficiency standards for privately rented homes. There are also growing question marks over whether the government will press ahead with its proposals to stop the installation of gas boilers in new homes by 2025.

Growing caution

Josh Buckland, an advisor on energy and environment issues in Theresa May’s government, says this increasingly cautious tone on climate change issues has been brewing at Westminster for several months.

“There’s obviously been some concern around the regulatory costs particularly to landlords and that’s obviously an area the Conservative party is trying to back away from.”

“There is definitely a growing caution within both parties around commitments on green issues, which will directly impact consumers, whether that be through higher input costs or maybe behaviour change.”

The most important factor behind this caution is the cost of living, which is penetrating into sections of the middle classes traditionally been immune from such concerns, says Adam Bell, director of policy at consultancy Stonehaven. He stresses that ministers will be keen to shift the blame for these pressures away from themselves.

Any move to backtrack on heat pump requirements skirts around the main issue, says Bell, the government’s former head of energy strategy: “What’s holding back house building is not whether you have a gas boiler but are you able to build the house and do you have planning permission to do so.”

The losers from postponing new regulations on energy efficiency and low carbon heat will be the tenants and new homeowners who will be saddled with living in colder properties that are more expensive to run, he adds.

John Penrose MP, a leading voice among backbench Conservatives on energy issues, says those who appose higher standards in this area must come up with solutions for tackling a problem that is holding down UK living standards and economic productivity more broadly.

“It isn’t something which we can duck or pretend isn’t an issue. It really is,” he insists.

“They need to come up with something which shows how you’re going to improve the energy efficiency of British buildings through other mechanisms.”

Blockers on bold moves

Despite this pressure, the government’s commitment to come up with proposals next spring to rebalance the environmental and social levies on gas and electricity bills looks in doubt, says Bell: “I can’t see any scope for doing that right now. It is the right move and in the long run will lower costs but the short run pain is just too much. There’ll be nothing getting through government that imposes any more costs on consumers.“

Buckland agrees: “The challenge the government has is that gas bills continue to be higher than they have been historically and therefore anything that adds cost to gas, even if it’s shifting costs from electricity, becomes politically challenging. My view would be that they’ll struggle to make significant progress on that pre-election.”

Fewer risks surround any watering down of the government’s commitment to phase out the sale of new gas boilers though, given that this is not due to kick in until 2035, he says: “In reality, the government has already signalled that it’s going to do a long-term phase out not an immediate ban.”

However the wider political climate will put a block on bold moves, says Bean Beanland, director for growth and external affairs at the Heat Pump Federation.

“Politically, it’s going to be very challenging for at least a year until the election and then you got to break in a new government and a whole lot of new politicians.”

“Big ticket things are going to probably be difficult, although we might get something across the line,” he says, adding that there will still be value in the government continuing to signal a direction of travel on policy.

While the Conservatives may have successfully capitalised on an environmental issue in one by-election, it is a stretch to suggest that this will work more widely, Bell says: “I don’t think climate change is enough of a wedge issue. There’s just not enough meat on the bones there.

“It feels as though this is not a winner for the government. It’s merely a short-term response to a very specific set of electoral circumstances.

“There is a bigger strategic challenge, which they are not grappling with around how you genuinely reduce costs in people’s day to day lives.

“It’s more grasping at straws rather than anything substantive.”

He points out that reams of polling data shows that the drive to net zero continues to command broad based support amongst the public.

The most recent such evidence was an opinion poll published by RenewableUK showing that even among loyal Tory voters support is greater for going further on net zero than reversing it.

“There’s no evidence that the public opinion is shifted against any of those things and, I would say, public opinion still on the move,” says Beanland.

Buckland, who is now a director at public affairs agency Flint Global, says: “The polling shows you poll after poll that the environmental agenda, the issue of climate change is in the top five and that continues to be the case. The polling analysts and the political strategists in both parties will be aware of that and know they need a green offer come the next election.”

Reasons to be cheerful

Meanwhile the focus on Uxbridge has eclipsed the massive victory achieved on the same day in the Somerton and Frome by-election by the Liberal Democrats, whose voters tend to be the biggest supporters of pro-climate change action, argues Nathan Bennett, head of public affairs at RenewableUK.

“We’re spending a lot of time talking about London and we’re not spending a lot of time talking about the enormous majority that the Lib Dems won in the south west.”

Conservative electoral strategists will also be aware that they lost swathes of seats to the Lib Dems and the Green Party in May’s local elections.

And while noisy net zero critics, like former chief Brexit negotiator Lord Frost, have been attracting headlines over the past week, the policy still commands a “really strong core of supportive MPs”, says Bennett, who hasn’t seen evidence of the government rowing back on its clean energy their ambitions post Uxbridge.

These kinds of factors help explain why there will not be a “fundamental” backing away from the net zero agenda, says Buckland: “The Conservatives are either looking at particular issues where they feel there’s a distinct difference in the party’s approach rather than backing away completely from the net zero agenda.”

Penrose reckons that UK’s commitment to its net zero pledge “thankfully” is “not in question”.

But the “most economically rational way” of getting there is going to be a “shifting frontier” as different technologies develop and commercialise, he says: “If it means that we are more likely now to take the most commercial way possible of getting to net zero without diluting our commitment, that’s a really good thing because it means that not only is it better for the economy, it makes our productivity better. but it also it maximises the chance of creating and maintaining a democratic consensus behind net zero and stops that getting eroded.”

The real downside though is how the post-Uxbridge debate has distracted attention from how to drive forward in the UK when progress is picking up in other countries, notably the US, says Bennett: “The frustration is that before the by-election, the conversation was building up to this massive industrial opportunity for the UK to grasp.

“The whole conversation should be Treasury and the government thinking about our strategy in the clean energy sector and we’re not seeing that. Instead, we’re having this whole public conversation about the vices and virtues of doing net zero.”