UK net zero policies: what has Sunak scrapped and what do changes mean?
Rishi Sunak has announced a watering-down of the UK’s net zero policies, though claims he still wishes to meet the legally binding 2050 target. The prime minister said this was to save money for families, declaring: “If we continue down this path, we risk losing the consent of the British people and the resulting backlash will not just be against specific policies, but against the wider mission itself.”
But what has he scrapped? Will it actually save the people of the UK any money? And what will it mean for the climate crisis? The Guardian has looked into each policy and what the change means.
Cars
New cars with combustion engines were due to be banned from sale by 2030. This has been pushed back to 2035, with the government claiming it will save consumers money. Sunak said by 2030 he expected “the vast majority” of cars sold would be electric, because they are getting cheaper, and people are buying more, but thatpeople should make that decision themselves – not the government.
Experts disagree. Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said: “Delaying the phase-out of petrol and diesel cars would mean that UK drivers will remain exposed to the volatility of international oil prices, which are rising due to cuts by major producers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia. The UK’s dependence on fossil fuels is costly and economically damaging.”
He added that the “weakening of the targets … will undermine investment, as many furious companies have pointed out today”.
Peter Chalkley, director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said the changes would actually end up costing consumers more.
He said: “The vast majority, 80%, of drivers buy secondhand and secondhand petrol cars that would be on the market for literally decades to come. Delaying this policy will push up the cost of motoring as cheaper secondhand EVs that are much cheaper to run than petrol cars will be less available.”
It could also cost in a wider sense as car manufacturers lose confidence in the UK because of its ever-changing targets and policies. As Lisa Brankin, the chair of Ford UK, said: “Our business needs three things from the UK government: ambition, commitment and consistency. A relaxation of 2030 would undermine all three.”
Sunak spoke of the need to improve the electricity grid – to date, the government has been slow to introduce electric vehicle charging points, especially in some parts of the country, and has failed to upgrade the electricity grid (except for people lucky enough to live near Sunak’s swimming pool).
Boilers
The UK’s reliance on imported gas is expected to continue for longer as Sunak announced his plans to significantly weaken the plan to phase out the installation of gas boilers by 2035, instead aiming for only an 80% phase-out. He also said the 2026 ban on off-grid oil boilers would be delayed to 2035, with only an 80% phase-out target at that date.
He said: “We will give people far more time to make the necessary transition to heat pumps.
“We will never force anyone to rip out their existing boiler and replace it with a heat pump. You’ll only ever have to make the switch when you’re replacing your boiler anyway – and even then, not until 2035.”
Again, Sunak claims this was aimed at saving households money. While Ward said it was positive that the prime minister announced that grants for people under the boiler upgrade scheme would be increased by 50%, going up to £7,500, he added: “The prime minister appears to have forgotten that the current cost of living crisis has been triggered by a huge increase in the price of natural gas following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the UK would have suffered less if it had moved more quickly to embrace clean electricity and clean alternatives to gas central heating.
“If the winter ahead in Europe is long and cold, natural gas prices will rise again, leading to higher bills for households and businesses and higher inflation.”
Chalkley said: “The fact is the gas boiler and petrol car phase-out aren’t set to have any impact on those struggling with bills for at least a decade. The boiler phase-out would start in 2035 but only for those whose boiler breaks.”
Even then, it is not always more expensive for homes to install heat pumps than traditional gas boilers. Octopus Energy this month unveiled a new heat pump design that, with current government support, can be installed for free in some homes, and for £3,000 in those that need upgrades including insulation. These costs will go down as competition increases and more people install heat pumps. Heat pumps are also cheaper to operate than gas boilers if homes are well insulated.
Andrew Sissons from Nesta, an innovation charity, said there were other low-carbon alternatives to heat pumps being developed, including direct electric heating and new low-carbon fuels. “The main aim of the phase-out date is to give everyone – the heating industry, consumers, regulators – lots of time to prepare for a world without new boilers. If the heating industry – the companies that make boilers and the engineers that fit them in our homes – knows it can’t sell gas boilers after 2035, it has time to invest, switch production, retrain and build up its business in low-carbon heating. The other big advantage of a phase-out date is that it starts to wind down use of gas boilers gradually by 2050. Boilers often last about 15 years, so the 2035 date gives enough time for most boilers to be gone in time for net zero in 2050.”
Insulation
The UK has some of the most badly insulated housing stock in Europe. Sunak announced he would no longer require homeowners and landlords to meet energy efficiency targets. He promised not to force homeowners into what he termed “expensive insulation upgrades”.
There had been plans to fine landlords who failed to upgrade their properties to a certain level of energy efficiency, but these have now been dropped.
This will save an immediate cost to landlords, who will not have to pay to insulate homes they do not live in, but their renters will face costs. Last year, research found that people living in more poorly insulated homes would have to spend £1,000 on gas over a winter.
Chalkley said: “The one measure that would have brought down bills is the landlord energy efficiency rules. Rented accommodation is some of the worst quality and so most costly to heat with tenants having no power to insulate themselves. [This] will add to the cost of living for those struggling, not make things easier.”
Behaviour change
Sunak has been clear in the past he is not going to tell people not to fly as much as they like or to eat less meat. Now he has confirmed his party will not take forward policies that would encourage more sustainable behaviour, such as taxing airlines properly and informing the public of the carbon footprint of meat. These policies, to disincentivise eating meat and flying, have never been proposed by either the Labour or Conservative government but have been discussed by civil servants in government departments as potential ways to help meet net zero.
Sunak said: “The proposal for government to interfere in how many passengers you can have in your car – I’ve scrapped it.
“The proposal that we should force you to have seven different bins in your home – I’ve scrapped it.
“The proposal to make you change your diet and harm British farmers by taxing meat, or to create new taxes to discourage flying or going on holiday. I’ve scrapped those too.”
While most of the changes that are needed to get to net zero should fall on big businesses rather than being shouldered by the consumer, experts suggest it should be easier and cheaper to make less carbon-emitting choices. For example, catching a train is much more expensive than flying by plane.
On the climate cost of our diets, Henry Dimbleby, a former government food tsar, said: “This isn’t primarily, as most people think, about methane. It is about freeing up land. Almost 80% of the land used to feed us in the UK is used to graze animals or produce food to feed to animals. It’s a staggeringly inefficient use of resources.
“It is clear that the single biggest change to diet to solve both the climate and biodiversity crises is to eat less meat. But of all the topics we tested with focus groups while writing the national food strategy, it was clear that this is the most politically contentious.”
The costs of not reaching net zero
Aside from the direct impact on consumers’ pockets, experts point out that by far the largest costs involved in this are the cost of not acting on climate breakdown.
Ward said this weakening of policies could have “a disproportionately negative long-term impact on the UK economy”.
“It could hurt economic growth by undermining domestic and overseas investment in a range of sectors that are developing and deploying clean technologies, such as heat pumps and electric vehicles,” he said. “And it could make UK households poorer and colder because they will remain highly exposed to volatile fossil fuel prices.”
The Office for Budget Responsibility recently found that the costs of continued gas reliance were more than double those of reaching net zero. It also said in 2021 the cost would be mostly offset by savings on fossil fuels, and would be “comparatively modest”, amounting to a few billion a year over the period to 2050.
Furthermore, cost of living impacts from extreme weather events and global food systems collapsing will be far greater if we don’t urgently act to decarbonise. Ed Hawkins, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, said: “Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide, which causes global warming, which amplifies the consequences of extreme weather events, as we have so clearly seen this summer.
“Climate change will continue until we reach net zero globally, and we will then have to suffer the consequences of that warmer world for decades or more. It also matters how we reach net zero, not just when – delaying action means more emissions which means more severe consequences.”
