10-point Plan: Six Months On

Statement

The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Tuesday 18 May.

“With your permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a Statement. Last November, the Prime Minister announced a radical and ambitious response to the economic impact of Covid-19. This was, of course, the UK’s Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution. Its aim is to build back better, to use our recovery to level up the country, to scale up new industries and to support jobs throughout the United Kingdom as we accelerate on our path to net zero by 2050.

Six months on, I am pleased to inform the House that we are already seeing this ambition being delivered on. The 10-point plan is projected to create and support up to 250,000 jobs, and mobilise £12 billion of government investment and up to three times as much from the private sector by 2030. We are investing in the UK’s most important asset—our workforce—to ensure that our people have the right skills to deliver the low-carbon transition and thrive in the high-value jobs this will create. This is the case for the engineers and construction workers who will build the new offshore wind farms and nuclear plants to provide clean power to our homes, and the retrofitters who will make homes more comfortable and efficient. This work of course builds on the strong progress we have already made as a country in decarbonising our economy. Last year, we hit over two months of coal-free electricity generation, which is the longest streak since the Industrial Revolution. Two weeks ago, we broke a new wind power record, with both onshore and offshore wind turbines generating 48.5% of the electricity in Great Britain. The plan is projected to reduce UK emissions by 180 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent between 2023 and 2032. I am sure Members are aware that that is equal to taking all today’s cars off the road for about two years.

Since the 10-point plan’s publication, we have enshrined the UK’s sixth carbon budget in law, proposing in that a target that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 78% by 2035 compared with 1990 levels. That is an enormous commitment, but one that we are working extremely hard—flat out, indeed—to achieve. Our energy White Paper has set out a comprehensive, strategic vision for the transformation of the energy system consistent with delivering net-zero emissions by 2050. We have also launched our new, ambitious UK emissions trading scheme, for consultation later this year.

On offshore wind, we have confirmed up to £95 million of government investment for two new offshore wind ports: Able Marine Energy Park—AMEP—on the south bank of the River Humber, which will receive up to £75 million of government investment; and Teesworks offshore manufacturing centre, on the River Tees, which will receive up to £20 million. Those investments have already been endorsed by business. Since the launch of the 10-point plan, we have seen a 501% increase in British businesses signing up for the UN’s Race to Zero initiative. Rolls-Royce is working on the world’s largest jet engine, which will cut aviation emissions, as part of its £500 million UltraFan engine project. Jaguar Land Rover has announced plans to be all-electric from 2025, with Ford, Bentley, Volvo and Nissan stating that they will do this from 2030. Just today, GE Renewable Energy has announced that it expects to create up to 470 green jobs to support the delivery and operation of all three phases of the Dogger Bank wind farm, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, located off the north-east coast. The impressive growth of the offshore wind sector presents a great example of how delivering net zero will help us level up across the UK. It also demonstrates the confidence that international investors have in our contracts for difference approach and the immense confidence employers have in our people, particularly those in the north-east, where so much of this infrastructure is being deployed.

However, this is not just about energy; each of us has a contribution to make. We are helping businesses and people to go greener every day, by delivering on our commitment to greener business, buildings and transport. In March, we published the UK’s industrial decarbonisation strategy, the first strategy of its kind from any major economy in the world. It sets out clearly how industry can meaningfully decarbonise, remaining competitive and reducing emissions, instead of simply offshoring our industries and pushing emissions abroad.

To that end, the industrial energy transformation fund has already allocated nearly £300 million to 39 projects to help industry transition to a low-carbon future. This month we began the process for deciding the first carbon capture cluster locations in our industrial heartlands, which will be operational by the mid-2020s, with another two set to be created by 2030. All this increased investment totals £1 billion, helping to support 50,000 jobs, potentially, in areas such as the Humber, the north-east and the north-west, and in Scotland and Wales. We are providing £1 billion of funding to phase 1 of the public sector decarbonisation scheme, which will support up to 30,000 jobs. These jobs will be in building services, engineering and design, low-carbon heating, installation of renewable energy sources and energy-efficiency measures.

The 10-point plan is our commitment on meeting the fourth and fifth carbon budgets. Further strategies for sectors of the economy will be set out over the next year. This will include publication of our heat and buildings strategy, ahead of COP 26, to set out our long-term approach to reducing emissions from all buildings in this country. It also includes our hydrogen strategy, which is backed by a £240 million net-zero hydrogen fund investment, to support—I stress this point—both green hydrogen produced by electrolysers and blue hydrogen enabled by carbon capture and storage.

We have also committed a further £20 million to increase the number of on-street charge points for electric vehicles. We will provide £50 million to help people and businesses install these charge points. We will also publish our transport decarbonisation plan as soon as possible, setting out an ambitious pathway to end UK transport’s carbon emissions by 2050 at the latest. I know that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Transport is fully engaged and committed to publishing that.

The impact of those commitments can already be seen. As of March 2021, battery electric vehicle sales stand at 7.7% of the market, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle sales are 6.1%, which is a huge increase of 88% and 152% respectively from only a year ago. Our acceleration towards low-emission vehicles will not only contribute to cutting our carbon emissions but strengthen British industry through supporting up to 40,000 jobs by 2020.

All these policies and initiatives are coming together and will be set out in our net zero strategy in the autumn. The strategy will build on the 10-point plan, and it will make the most of new growth and employment opportunities across the UK as we build back better and greener from Covid-19.

It will not have escaped honourable Members’ notice that we will be hosting COP 26 towards the end of the year, and what we are doing now is setting the scene for that historic event. In that context, our ambition and our leadership are absolutely crucial. The 10-point plan demonstrates our commitment not only to the green recovery but to the kind of leadership that we want to show in this vitally important year. All these actions bring us a step closer to net zero by 2050, meeting this planet’s greatest threat with ambition and innovation, which is absolutely necessary if we are to hit our goals. I believe passionately and sincerely that a new era of green jobs through Britain’s green industrial revolution has been inaugurated. I commend this Statement to the House.”

I thank the Minister and his department for the energy Statement. This is the scatter-gun 10-point plan: six months on—the repeat. We have a climate emergency, the most pressing issue of our age, which the Conservatives call hyperbole. They cannot bring themselves to declare and sign up to the size of the challenge. The Statement says the Government are already delivering on it, yet in the next sentence says the plan is projected to create so many jobs and mobilise so much investment. These are targets without delivery, rhetoric without reality and wishful thinking. This is underlined by the point in the Statement that says the Government

“have enshrined the UK’s sixth carbon budget in law”.

However, this is yet to happen. The statutory instrument has yet to go through your Lordships’ House for approval. We will not oppose it, but merely point out that the Government have yet to meet the fourth and fifth carbon budgets, mentioned in the Statement, which refer to years sooner than those referred to in the sixth carbon budget.

The climate emergency is real. What these scattergun headlines miss is a comprehensive overall plan, with priorities and route maps along the way to meet in a systematic way the challenges we face. I congratulate the Government on starting to face the task since announcing the scattergun headline plan six months ago. The gestation is slowly evolving. The Government have at least published the energy White Paper, The North Sea Transition Deal, and have begun to recognise the further missing strategies as ingredients that need to be addressed and delivered if this plan is to be comprehensive. The response to the climate emergency is nowhere near being oven ready.

I thank the Minister for recognising in this Statement that we still need a heat and building strategy ahead of COP 26. We still need a transport decarbonisation plan. More than ever, we need a national retrofit and fuel poverty strategy with skills training, now that the green homes grant scheme has been abandoned and its funding withdrawn, rather than being allocated elsewhere. Where is the Treasury’s crucial net-zero review, due in the autumn last year, then promised this spring? Can the Minister give us another target? When will it see the light of day and set the overall size and context of the financial commitment needed? Germany has invested £38 billion in a green recovery, France £31 billion; and in the US President Biden has committed $1 trillion of his green infrastructure plan to green initiatives.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, for his comments. Obviously, I do not agree with many of them, but let me go through the points he raised in turn.

He talked about the fifth and sixth carbon budgets. The noble Lord needs to see this in the context of the UK’s record on decarbonisation. As he said, we have recently, on 21 April, laid the legislation to set the sixth carbon budget, covering 2033-2037. That will require a 78% reduction in emissions compared to 1990. In addition to the carbon budgets, as he is well aware, we have set the highly ambitious nationally determined contribution, through the UN process, to reduce emissions in 2030 by at least 68% compared to 1990 levels. This is the highest reduction target made by any advanced economy. We have shown through our actions that cutting emissions and growing the economy can go hand in hand. We achieved record clean growth between 1990 and 2019. Our economy has grown by 78%, and at the same time, we have managed to reduce emissions by 44%. That is a better record than any other G7 nation. I would have hoped that the noble Lord might at least have given us some credit for delivering that.

The noble Lord mentioned the green homes grant. Yes, we will not hide from the fact that it did run into some difficulties in terms of delivery, but we have made excellent progress across much of the investment. We have invested substantial sums in social housing, schools and hospitals, as well as in homes through the green homes grant, in particular supporting local authorities through the local authority delivery scheme. As he will be aware, the Chancellor also announced additional funding of £300 million going into the local authority delivery scheme, and we are working in partnership with many local authorities. I have met with many of them, and they are very grateful for this funding.

He asked about the Treasury net zero review. We have announced that the net zero report will be published this spring. It was delayed from autumn last year because of the pandemic. In the meantime—in order to keep his reading up to speed—Her Majesty’s Treasury published an interim report this autumn. This sets out our approach to the review and analysis which will form the final report. The initial timing of the review was delayed due to the Covid crisis. Given these circumstances, we took the decision to move publication to 2021, so if he will have a little bit more patience, the review will be there for him to read shortly. He also mentioned our investment in transport decarbonisation. Let me give him some of the figures. We have provided £1.3 billion to accelerate the rollout of charge points for electric vehicles, we have provided £582 million in plug-in vehicles grants, we have spent nearly £500 million on the automotive transformation fund and we spent considerable sums on improving public transport and government investment in low-carbon buses and trains. In March, we published England’s long-term national bus strategy, setting out a bold vision for bus services across the country.

My Lords, we now come to the 20 minutes allocated to Back-Bench questions. I ask that questions and answers be brief so that I can call the maximum number of speakers.

I have given notice to the Minister that I wish to concentrate on the role of the national grid. On a number of occasions that I have come across, the national grid has been shown to be operating at margins that are very close. For example, and this is an instance that I am familiar with, if you want to run a couple more freight trains up the east coast main line, immediately the shout goes up, “The power supplies will not support this!” It is the case that throughout the economy a lot of people are going to have to spend a lot more money on electricity both to charge their cars and run their trains, particularly freight trains. I am something of a hydro-sceptic, but even if you want hydrogen you are going to have to spend electricity money on it.

When I looked today at National Grid’s shareholders, many of them could hardly be described as friends of Great Britain. The sorts of friends that you see in that list are perhaps not always the sort with which you wish to be associated. So my question for the Minister is: is Ofgem up to the job of making sure that National Grid is preparing plans so that the electricity is available to do many of the things to which he has drawn attention? This is possibly a national fault, but we run too close to the margin and then, when we want to do something a bit extra, find that we cannot.