Rishi Sunak confirms rollback of key green targets

Rishi Sunak confirms rollback of key green targets | Green politics | The Guardian

Rishi Sunak has announced a major rethink of his government’s climate policies, rolling back some of the UK’s most important green targets in one of his biggest policy U-turns in office.

At a press conference in Downing Street, the prime minister announced the UK would no longer plan to end the sale of new gas boilers by 2035, and would push back the deadline for selling new petrol and diesel cars by five years.

Sunak’s announcement came after a chaotic 24 hours, during which details of his planned speech were leaked, causing the prime minister to bring it forward by 48 hours.

Even before he gave the speech, Sunak was facing a barrage of criticism not only from opposition parties but also from business groups and many of his fellow Conservative MPs.

Sunak defended his decision on Wednesday, painting it as a corrective after years of politicians setting climate targets without considering the impact on the public. “We’ve stumbled into a consensus about the future of our country that no one seems to be happy with,” he said.

He added: “We seem to have defaulted to an approach which will impose unacceptable costs on hard-working British families, costs that no one was ever really told about and which may not actually be necessary to deliver the emissions reduction that we need.”

The most significant rollback is a delay to the deadline for phasing out the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, from 2030 to 2035. “To give us some more time to prepare, I’m announcing today that we’re going to ease the transition to electric vehicles,” he said.

Carmakers have spent hundreds of millions of pounds over the last few years investing in electric vehicle manufacturing to prepare for the 2030 deadline, and many of them reacted angrily to news of the delay.

Lisa Brankin, the chair of Ford UK, said on Wednesday morning: “Our business needs three things from the UK government: ambition, commitment and consistency. A relaxation of 2030 would undermine all three.”

The prime minister also announced a delay to the target for eliminating the sale of gas boilers to homes. Under Sunak’s new policy, homeowners will only have to replace their gas boilers with electric heat pumps when they are replacing their boilers anyway. And many homes will be exempt from the demand altogether.

“We need a fairer, better approach to decarbonising how we heat our homes,” he said.

Sunak also said he was removing the requirement for householders to make changes to their homes under the Great British Insulation Scheme, which aimed to insulate 300,000 homes a year for the next three years. Instead, he said the government would continue to subsidise energy efficiency, but not force homeowners to make the necessary upgrades.

Before the speech, the energy supplier E.ON condemned the move. Chris Norbury, the chief executive of E.ON UK, said: “We risk condemning people to many more years of living in cold and draughty homes that are expensive to heat, in cities clogged with dirty air from fossil fuels, missing out on the regeneration this ambition brings.”

The prime minister billed his approach as a middle road between those who want far tougher climate action and those who do not believe humans are causing climate change at all.

He claimed that the “consent of the British people” was at risk if the government ploughed on with planned measures to tackle the climate crisis.

But he also acknowledged the backlash that his U-turn had caused. Responding to questions after the speech, Sunak said: “I get that lots of people out there are going to be critical of what I’m doing today – they’ll have their own views,” he said.

“The question for all those people who are criticising this approach is to ask them to justify to all those families up and down the country why they think it’s right to ask them to find £10,000, £15,000, £20,000 at a time.”