Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to ensure the UK secures its bid to host the 2020 UN Climate Change Conference.

We are regularly engaging at Ministerial and official level with interested countries and the Western European and Others Group of the United Nations, as part of a coordinated cross-Government effort to demonstrate the UK is a committed, effective and ambitious leader on climate change and a good potential COP26 host. Our offer to host builds on the strong progress we have made towards the legally binding targets in our world-leading Climate Change Act, and on our broader climate credentials. Between 1990 and 2017, we have reduced our emissions by over 40 per cent while growing the economy by more than two thirds. In order to continue this progress, we have placed clean growth at the heart of our Industrial Strategy and made it one of four Grand Challenges. Thanks to this robust platform of domestic action and our diplomatic network, we continue to be at the forefront of encouraging the world to move towards clean growth.