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LONDON — The man who signed the U.K.’s ambitious climate pledge into law is quitting — and it’s not clear anyone else wants to step into the breach.
Chris Skidmore was energy minister under Theresa May and helped the then-prime minister enshrine the target of reducing the country’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2050 as one of her final acts in office.
He has been called in for one last job, as the author of a major review of the U.K.’s net-zero policy. It was commissioned under the short and tumultuous tenure of the previous prime minister, Liz Truss.
“It’s like a rare Tudor coin,” he tells POLITICO. “The report is maybe one of the only things that exists as a legacy from the Truss administration.”
Skidmore sees the report as his last chance to influence policy before he steps down as an MP at the next election.
His planned departure comes as a host of the Conservative Party’s big beasts on climate change are simultaneously going into retirement of one form or another.
Boris Johnson, who embraced net-zero both as a personal cause and a vote winner, was forced from office and can no longer act as the party’s conscience on the subject. He can, of course, irritate successor-but-one Rishi Sunak from the sidelines — as he did by pointedly showing up at the COP27 climate summit. But Johnson cannot strong-arm his more skeptical colleagues into action as he once did.
Under Johnson, upholding the net-zero target was one of the six promises which led the 2019 Conservative manifesto. Climate action is notably absent from the five pledges Sunak has identified as his own priorities in government.
Alok Sharma, the U.K.’s COP26 president who earned plaudits for his determined stewardship of last year’s COP26 summit, has handed over the baton to Egypt and was not given another job in government afterwards.
There is now one minister explicitly responsible for climate change — Graham Stuart — who does not attend Cabinet and has kept a low profile since his appointment to the role.
“There is this vacuum,” Skidmore observes. “We don’t have the cockpit of the COP26 presidency anymore, and people still look to the U.K. to come up with the solutions to shared problems.”
At the same time, the opposition Labour Party is going on the offensive on climate.
Keir Starmer’s plan for a national energy company was at the heart of the Labour leader’s last party conference speech. A shadow cabinet minister confirmed this grab for the agenda had been made possible by Johnson’s departure and the apparent reluctance of anyone in the Conservative Party to take up his mantle.
Sunak has vowed to uphold the net-zero agenda, but he is less strident in his approach than Johnson and has been accused of mixed messaging on the subject.
Skidmore fears that inaction on climate change will create “a perfect storm” which could see the Conservatives lose votes in the north and the south of the country at the next election.
The so-called “Red Wall” — parts of England’s de-industrialized North and Midlands which went Tory for the first time in 2019 — could flip if the government doesn’t get a move on with approving new job-creating green projects. And, in wealthier southern seats, the Labour Party is now less vulnerable to the Green Party than it was at the last election.
Green investment jitters
In addition to the potential electoral cost of inaction, the overriding message of Skidmore’s 340-page review is that the U.K. is losing out on green investment because of inconsistent decision-making at the top of government and delays to crucial planning decisions at a local level.
“People are telling us they want to invest the money in the U.K., but they’re not willing to commit just yet because they don’t feel that the environment is there,” Skidmore says. It’s a business worry he believes has been “accelerated” by the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the United States, which floats subsidies and tax breaks to spur new climate-friendly investment.
The British government is reportedly wary of EU moves to replicate the IRA, and there are concerns it could get caught in the middle of a transatlantic green subsidy war.
Skidmore meanwhile warns of a “complete disjoin between our climate commitments and the reality of meeting them,” with some projects which have already been given the thumbs-up discovering that connecting to the country’s power grid will not be possible until 2032.
His review calls for an infrastructure strategy to underpin new clean power initiatives, and pitches a ban on gas boilers in new homes from 2025.
Skidmore also wants Sunak’s government to set up an Office for Net Zero Delivery, in a sign he is unimpressed by the inability of successive Conservative governments to pursue a consistent line on the environment.
“There are mistakes that have been made, and the cost has been borne by the British people,” the former minister says.
He cites the abandonment of home insulation initiatives under David Cameron, prevarication over nuclear power, Truss’ love affair with fracking for shale gas, and the recent decision of Sunak’s government to approve a new coal mine in Cumbria.
Skidmore was caught up in the chaotic vote which preceded Truss quitting as prime minister, where Tory MPs were threatened with losing the party whip if they failed to vote against a Labour motion to ban fracking.
“I nearly became an independent MP on the back of that vote,” he says, “because I couldn’t have confidence in a government that was going to break the manifesto commitments that we originally made on fracking.”
He is just as scathing over Sunak’s move to go ahead with the construction of the U.K.’s first new deep coal mine in three decades.
“We wanted to be a key leader in green steel and the British steel industry wants to be able to create a low-carbon steel that they can export abroad… It’s a classic decision where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
At the time of the announcement, the U.K.’s leveling-up department released a reasoning document seeking to explain the decision, which argued that the proposed mine was “likely to be much better placed to mitigate” greenhouse gas emissions when set against “comparative mining operations around the world.”
The government has yet to offer its official response to Skidmore’s net zero review.
The former minister estimates the Sunak administration has little more than a year to make its impact felt on climate, and argues that setting up an Office for Net Zero Delivery “would provide a consistent single voice from government over what needs to happen.”
Asked who might carry that forward, he conspicuously does not name anyone in the current Cabinet.
And, as he heads for the exit door, all Skidmore can offer is that he’s placing his hope in a “new generation which will take this on.”
