Just a few short hours after EG met with Lord Deben, the outgoing chair of the Climate Change Committee, an increasingly familiar orange paint was sprayed on to the walls and windows of Mitsubishi Estate’s 1 Victoria Street, SW1, the home of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
The graffiti attack, by controversial campaign group Just Stop Oil, was organised to draw attention to what it called the government’s hypocrisy on net zero and climate change. And while energy secretary Grant Shapps dismissed the stunt as “illegal criminal damage”, Conservative peer Lord Deben, better known to many as former environment secretary John Gummer, took an altogether different angle.
“I think politicians ought to listen to Just Stop Oil,” he tells EG from his London office on Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1. “They are saying something which is absolutely in the minds of the new generation. Because they know that we are leaving them with an intolerable, uninhabitable world. And they are bloomin’ fed up.”
He is too polite to ever actually swear, of course, but it is clear that he is “bloomin’ fed up” too.
The 83-year-old is intent on doing something about climate change before it is too late. He wants government to be harder, not softer, on its policies and demands of business and voters alike.
“One has to face the fact that it is difficult,” he says, commenting on the Conservative’s recent reassessment of its net-zero demands. “But I would be very much tougher with the built environment.”
He is referring to recent plans to soften EPC rulings for residential landlords, pushing back the deadline to reach a C rating from 2028.
Instead, he reckons housebuilders should be prevented from building homes that fail to meet net-zero (EPC A) requirements and that they should be forced to remediate “substandard” homes they may already have built.
Planning for the future
It would be a difficult pill to swallow for many housebuilders, no doubt, but with recent figures showing that just 4.1% of new homes built in the past three months alone were EPC A rated, it is a pill that probably needs to be prescribed.
“We have built a million and a half houses over the last few years which are not fit for the future,” says Deben. “Housebuilders have made a profit by putting the cost of retrofit on to the people who bought those houses, which is why I’m very radical about it.
“We need to have an overarching statement in the planning acts,” he adds. “I’ve been saying that since we first had net zero as our aim. That statement needs to say that no planning permission should be considered, or given, or refused, except in the context and recognition of the government’s commitment on net zero. So that means that even with the smallest planning application, people actually ask the questions about whether this development is fit for the future.”
When EG sits down with Deben, parts of Southern Europe are on fire, the continent is recording its highest temperatures ever, a report by the Met Office states that temperatures of 40ºC will soon seem normal, even cool and the UN (and others) have concluded that there is no credible pathway to keeping global temperature increases to just 1.5ºC.
It is these occurrences that have Deben, while passionate about combating climate change, feeling “bloomin fed up”.
Pace not perfection
The latest CCC report, published at the end of June, will be Deben’s last. His successor is expected to be appointed in November, after an interim period in which climate scientist professor Piers Forster will act as chair. In the June report Deben said he had “markedly less” confidence that the UK will reach its 2030 net-zero goals than he had a just year ago.
“A key opportunity to push a faster pace of progress has been missed”, he says, adding that there is “a worrying hesitancy by ministers to lead the country to the next stage of net-zero commitments.”
What Deben wants to see now is leadership. From government and the private sector.
“The true test of leadership is delivery,” says Deben in his CCC report. “And here, I am more worried. The commitment of government to act has waned since our COP26 presidency. There is hesitation to commit fully to the key pledges. This will not win the fight.”
Deben wants ministers to “regroup on net zero and commit to bolder delivery”, adding that “this is a period when pace must be prioritised over perfection”.
Delivery – or the government’s lack of it – is a key theme in the conversation EG has with Deben. He harks back to his early days as environment minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government.
“Mrs Thatcher once said to me: ‘There are two people in this government who believe in global warming… you and me’,” says Deben. “She then paused and said: ‘We are therefore the majority’.”
But while Thatcher was an environmentalist in the mid to late 1980s, she cooled towards the end of her reign and in retirement, later dismissing it as “socialism through the back door”.
By the time Deben was environment secretary under John Major in the 1990s, he was receiving the flak for his own government’s failure to go green. The then Norwegian environment minister Thorbjørn Berntsen famously called him “drittsekk” (look it up) because of the UK’s lack of action on acid rain pollution.
The comment stung then and still does today. And Deben recognises he could have – should have – done more when he was in government. The intention was there, he insists.
“We were the first people to do anything about this. I remember in the ministry of agriculture when I was the deputy minister and minister of state, changing the rules about sea protection on the basis of climate change, which was unique.”
Echoing comments made to EG by his friend and former colleague Lord Heseltine earlier this year, Deben insists that leadership is the key. And, on this most vital of issues, that – and delivery – is what is lacking.
“We were the first country to put net zero as a statutory requirement. We have done those things. What we haven’t done, what we are not doing, is the delivery.”
And unless we start to deliver, there will be a reckoning for us all, he says. But it will come first for the politicians who played politics when they should have been making brave decisions.
“The government and the opposition will be held to account when people realise what they have failed to do,” he says.
“It is all very well saying at the moment we’ve had too much net zero, as some in the Conservative Party have said. But when the storms strike, when the heat is intolerable, when the immigration becomes impossible to stop because people are moving in vast quantities – and need to because there is nowhere at home for them to be – when that happens, the government and the opposition will be blamed.”
And that is why, if governments fail to progress on net zero, that business must push on.
And for Deben, he does not really care who leads. As long as someone does.
He says he is proud of the leadership being shown by some in the private sector, including the property industry and doesn’t mind that Landsec and British Land’s commitment to brownfield regeneration and net-zero carbon development came long before the government’s own.
“I’m a Conservative, so I rather like it to be that way round,” he says, laughing. “I think in the end we can’t do these things without the market. And the reason they are doing this is that the market is increasingly telling them to do it.”
To send feedback, e-mail piers.wehner@eg.co.uk or tweet @PiersWehner or @EGPropertyNews
