Carbon Budget Order 2026

Lord Deben Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as having been chairman of the Climate Change Committee for 11 years. I also chair a company advising on sustainability, business continuity and risk, and I am a partner in a small organic arable and livestock farm—so it may be said that one knows a little bit about what we are talking about.

I say to my noble friend that I listened to him make a brilliant speech yesterday on sport, and the brilliance of it was that he explained, first, why the Government had got it wrong and, secondly, how to put it right. The problem with his speech this evening is that neither of those has been part of it. It is no good standing up and saying that they do not like this or that. The truth is that a Conservative Government, when previously in opposition, were the creators of the Climate Change Act and they turned it into a cross-party agreement. Every Conservative Government have supported these policies to end up with meeting the Paris Agreement, which a Conservative Government signed. Yet at the moment all we hear is opposition to what is being proposed by the Government, on the basis of the very best advice that they could have.

There are a number of things that I think the Government are getting wrong. Any idea of loosening the movement to EVs is a great mistake, and the Government are also spending too much money on carbon capture and storage, as a matter of fact. But those are reasonable arguments to have from the point of view that we actually have to protect ourselves from the climate change that, surely, we are beginning to understand—as all the businesses I deal with understand —is no longer on the risk register: it is on today’s issue. How do we deal with this? The public and our grandchildren will never forgive us if what we do is to pretend that we are in favour of it in general, but not actually prepared to take the measures that are necessary. These figures are the necessary measures and are done far enough in advance for us to be able to deal with this.

It is very interesting that we should talk about intermittent renewables. The intermittency at the moment is with fossil fuels; the problem is that we cannot rely on them. It is also interesting that this is evidently “causing higher energy prices”, as 67% of the higher prices in this country and around Europe are because of the higher price of gas. What my noble friend proposes is to spend more money and more time on gas, instead of recognising that there is another fault of this Government, which is that they have wrongly continued the Conservative policy, which I opposed for 20 years, to put the costs of the necessary change on customers’ bills, instead of what they did between 1945 and 1951, when the Labour Party made the last huge change in our system and rightly said that that was a taxpayer’s price. If that came off now and was put on to the taxpayer’s bill, we would be properly competitive, and we would become more and more competitive as we moved.

It is all right talking about the Chinese—the Chinese are going to reach net zero by 2060, which means 2050, because they always promise in advance much less than they actually deliver. Every other country in the world that is thinking about the future is moving in this direction, because renewables are dependable and they are also cheaper. There is this idea that renewables are somehow deindustrialising Britain, but, since the Climate Change Act was passed, the GVA of the manufacturing industry has grown in real terms, and the CBI points out that there was £105 billion in added value in 2025 alone. This is a whole operation presented improperly. There is nothing in this order that is going to change whether I can grow my excellent red poll cattle.

The fact is that the reduction in our meat eating that the Climate Change Committee suggests we make is considerably less than that the medics think we ought to make; considerably less than Dimbleby, in his food strategy, said that we ought to make; and is less than what is now happening naturally. We have seen a 10% cut in the way people are eating, and there is nothing in this order that forces people to do more than that. We have to recognise that many of the people who will oppose this tonight are the same people who told us how wonderful leaving the European Union was, and the truth of the matter is that we can look at that. We have to look forward to a society in which we have protected our children and grandchildren from the menace of climate change, and until the Opposition are prepared to stand up with an alternative system that delivers that, it must be right to support what the Government are putting forward.