Welcome, everybody, to the latest meeting of the Environmental Audit Committee, part of our look into carbon budget 7. We are joined, I am very pleased to say, by Emma Pinchbeck and Dr James Richardson of the Climate Change Committee. Welcome to you both. If I could make a start with yourself, Emma. Obviously, members will be conscious that the Climate Change Committee has a new chair, Nigel Topping, CMG. Can you just explain to the Committee and those watching, how you see your working relationship with the new chair operating, and what your priorities are as a leadership team?

I would also like to put on the record my thanks to Professor Piers Forster, who served as interim Chair through much of the evidence that we are going to talk about today, and for his service; he continues on the committee. Nigel Topping has served on the committee through this period as well, so in that sense we know him, and he has been able to very much hit the ground running. In terms of priorities, it is obviously delivering our statutory work for [inaudible]. The biggest thing we have coming up next is the climate change risk assessment advice and the technical report for Government, which is due in the spring, so adaptation is the next big area of work. Nigel has made clear he would like to make sure we have the right experts on the committee for that statutory work and for other things that parliamentarians are interested in. As part of that, he is quite keen to get people on the committee who understand real-world delivery; that is the practitioners or in language people who have maybe worked in business in the private sector, or doing delivery on the ground of these measures. Then in terms of the wider environment, clearly it is a noisy environment out there, so we need to work harder to do our advice bit in the Climate Change Act and talk to parliamentarians and Government. That is on my mind. Lastly, there is a lot of interest in the issues around costs in energy transition and the impacts on households, wrapped in the bucket of how we make electricity cheaper. You can expect to see more from the committee on those issues over the next few months.

You alluded to the shifting or challenged consensus on some issues that we have seen in recent months. In terms of the Climate Change Committee’s approach, does that changing consensus pose new challenges for the committee? Given the committee’s role as an adviser to Government, when things that have maybe been accepted in the past are being challenged in the political mainstream, how does the Climate Change Committee respond to that changing political environment?

There are two things here. One is that we need to make sure we are doing the advising bit of the brief, which, for me, means not only engaging in formal inquiries with Select Committees but coming to see parliamentarians in the Lords and in the Commons, because the mandate of the CCC is to talk to parliamentarians so that you can hold Government to account. So we have to make sure we have the resources to do that. It is not enough just to put the reports up online and hope you read them, not least when there are 1,000 pages of evidence. I need to make sure I have the staff that can do that, and that the evidence we give you is useful. The other thing is making sure that we do our job of giving you independent evidence, which was always the job of the Climate Change Committee. The point of the CCC is that in a political environment where some decisions you have to take on climate change policies are political ones, you have an evidence base that is sound, that is led by the science and the evidence, and that is transparent and rigorous. Really making sure that our analysis stays first-class so that you have that trust in it, is the other part of the job.

Can you give us a brief overview of your 2025 progress report on reducing emissions and how that compares to your 2024 assessment?

There were some really good messages in the progress report and as you have mentioned the external environment, it is nice to have an opportunity to put those on the record. It is the tenth consecutive year of sustained emissions reduction in the UK. Emissions were down about 2.5% last year, which takes us to around a 50% reduction from 1990 levels. Then, quite excitingly for us, looking at the data that is coming through from the market, we are also starting to see change in some of the core technologies that we need. EV sales are up from 19.6% to 22%, which is around one fifth of the market share now. Charge point installations are up 40% and heat pump installations are up 56%. So there is a sign of the market moving. Tree planting, which is not really a technology but is definitely a solution, is up 59%. So there is good evidence in the data that there is noise in politics but on the ground things are changing, and that is largely because of the economics that you can find in the report. Where we had things to say about Government, we said there has been some positive policy development, particularly on power generation. We have heard lots of noise from this Government about clean electricity, but we would like to see more focus on electrifying demand. In English, that means electrifying heat and transport, and decarbonising those areas of the economy. To do that there needs to be action on electricity prices. We would like to see much more action on the demand side of energy and on making electricity cheap. Electricity is the fuel that underpins that transition on the demand side, so the cheaper it is, the faster the uptake of these technologies will be, because the savings start to accrue to households earlier.

The DESNZ Secretary of State has told us that the Government do not intend to publish a draft delivery plan ahead of legislating for the level of the seventh carbon budget, instead committing only to an impact assessment. He also encouraged this Committee to do some pre-legislative work, in terms of supporting Government in what that delivery plan, or the implications of CB7, might look like. What factors need to be considered in any impact assessment in order to facilitate meaningful parliamentary scrutiny ahead of the CB7 vote?

The first thing to note is that we are expecting the Government to publish an updated plan for the sixth carbon budget, which will give a lot of information about the delivery pathway into the 2030s. Then, they are saying that they will publish an impact assessment to supplement that on the seventh carbon budget. For us, a good impact assessment needs to have the key technologies in there, the measures that they are considering, and assessment of the costs and benefits of those. But we would encourage parliamentarians to look at the impact assessment alongside what comes out in the carbon budget delivery plan, which is due in the coming weeks.

Thank you for responding after the last time we met with regard to your committee’s engagement with Government Departments. You said that you had met Ministers at three different Departments, you had met officials only at three additional Departments and, at that stage, had not had any success in engaging with two of the other Departments. Were you satisfied with the response to your call for engagement? Are there any Departments you would particularly welcome more engagement from at all?

There has just been a reshuffle, so we need to make new relationships; we have to go and meet all the new Ministers. There is a new Minister in our sponsoring Department for the Climate Change Committee and, not relevant for the seventh carbon budget in the same way, but the DEFRA Secretary of State has changed. DEFRA is also a sponsoring Department, so that will be a priority. I have a new chair, so we need to do the introductory round there. Since meeting you, we have met with the Cabinet Office on adaptation and officials there. We have met with No. 10 and with Treasury; we were present at the launch of the Government’s industrial strategy, for example. Departments that we would like to see, particularly mindful of the adaptation advice coming, are the Department of Health because there is a lot in what we have to say on adaptation about health risks, so that would be good, and MHCLG, because a lot of what we have to say, both in terms of adaptation and mitigation, is about buildings and the built environment when you are looking at both emissions reduction and the need for adaptation going forward. Otherwise, just to come back to the beginning, part of the job is also to speak to all of you—parliamentarians of all parties—and make sure that you have had the chance to see the advice as well, and you will expect to see a lot more of us in that regard as well over the coming months.

Excellent. Maybe at a future session, we might encourage you to let us know which political parties have been most interested in meeting up with you and which ones have not.

Dr Richardson, in April you told us that the Government had indicated they would request formal advice from the CCC on how to deliver their airport expansion plans without breaching climate targets. Has this request materialised? If not, is it now too late, given the already approved expansion plans?

It has not materialised; it was written into the infrastructure strategy, so we have had a firmer indication and are confident that that will appear. But as I understand it, we will get it once the review of the airports national policy statement is launched. Is it too late? It is certainly not too late in terms of influencing that review of the ANPS, because that has not started. It took about 12 months to do last time around, so there should still be time for us to provide that advice.

You are not worried about the delays?

In a practical, can we do the work way, we are not worried about it, no.

Your balanced pathway for aviation involves a combination of sustainable aviation fuel, efficiency gains and removals. Which of these carries the most risk in terms of delivery and why?

It is really the more novel technologies here; it is one of the challenges with aviation that the technologies that we rely on are less certain. That is why we think it is important to have a mix of different approaches, because it is hard to know which will be the most successful. Ramping up the supply of sustainable aviation fuel is a challenge, and ramping up the supply of engineered removals is a challenge. These are relatively nascent technologies; we know that they work, the chemistry works, but can you do that at a sensible price? Can you fit things together? Those are really the biggest risks in the aviation pathway.

You have stated that contingency plans need to be in place to manage the significant risks associated with decarbonising aviation, and that this should include consideration of demand management measures. Appearing before this Committee, the former Aviation Minister appeared to rule out consideration of such measures. Have you seen evidence of how Government could credibly deliver aviation expansion while meeting climate targets without demand management, and what would be needed?

I do not want to pre-empt our advice specifically on the airport expansion, because I suspect that will end up being debated in a court of law, so it is quite important that we keep an open mind until we know what the specific question is there. But if I can maybe take a step back and try to answer your question more broadly, we do see a significant role for demand management in the pathway, particularly over the next 10 years or so, before those technologies come through, where we have, roughly speaking, flat demand. I do not wish to speak for him, but this may be where the former Minister may have misunderstood our advice as suggesting that you were kind of cutting demand from today’s level and stopping people from going on holiday, which is not what we have suggested. Clearly if those technologies do not come through, you might have to maintain that level of demand for a longer period, whereas we think once those technologies are more developed, it becomes easier to allow demand because you have ways of dealing with the carbon consequences of that.

Ms Pinchbeck, you started off talking to the Chair about the importance of independent evidence and the first-class analysis that the committee on climate change does. I have always had huge respect for that; it has been absolutely fundamental to the way in which you have maintained a bipartisan approach in Parliament broadly. I am seriously worried, though, about the way in which I think the committee is acquiescing in what the Government are planning for aviation. If they all go ahead, the proposals, as suggested now by Ministers, would see Luton expand from 18 million passengers per annum to 32 million; London City Airport from 6.5 million to 9 million; Gatwick from 43 million to 80 million; and Heathrow from 75 million to 140 million. That would take it from 102 million to 261 million passengers per annum being handled in those airports. That is well more than a 100% increase, yet you are telling us that emissions from aviation will fall by 17% by 2040, relative to 2023 levels. I cannot see the independent evidence and the first-class analysis on which you have based that.

As James has said, the difficulty is we cannot tell you what we are going to say in respect of airport expansion, because we have not received the commission yet.

Should the Government not have waited to announce airport expansion until it had that evidence from its independent adviser?

I think they have announced allowing Heathrow to proceed with its planning consent, subject to advice from the Climate Change Committee. I apologise, Barry, because I know you want more information about the relationship between airport expansion and the carbon budgets, but like a good independent statutory body, we will make sure that we ask our analysis that question properly and then give you the evidence when we have it. To do anything else today would probably pre-empt the findings of that analysis. Just sitting back from this briefly, aviation is a complex thing to model, and I have found it the hardest one to communicate for that reason. There is the same level of rigour in the numbers and the approach taken by the team on aviation as there is on any other area of the economy, and when we are asked the question on airport expansion, we will give you good analysis to help hold Government to account.

Thank you. You know that many of us will be looking and scrutinising it.

We are very aware of that, and that is exactly why I do not think it is appropriate to pre-empt it.

Can I also apologise that I do have to leave now, but I just wanted to put that in early.

Can I just go back to the first answer you gave to the Chairman when you talked about the difference between the 2024 report and 2025 and the reduction in carbon emissions? In that analysis, have you taken into consideration the reduction in carbon emissions due to offshoring of many of our energy-intensive industries, and the offshoring of the sources of some of our fossil fuel supplies? If so, how much does it contribute?

I will also ask James to make sure I get this right. The emissions reductions from last year are driven—pun intended—by the electrification of transport. So the rollout of electric vehicles and the increased decarbonisation of power generation is where a lot of the heavy lifting is being done. The emissions reduction in the UK over that 10-year period has largely been achieved through the decarbonisation of the power sector, which has been about the changeover from a largely coal and gas-fired power system to one which is using renewables and other low-carbon technologies. That is where the bulk of those emissions reductions have come from. Though it is not in the accounting framework for how you do the carbon budget, we look at consumption emissions as part of our analysis; we also look at supply chains. There is a chapter in CB7, in the carbon budget, which looks at emissions in supply chains from imports and the imports of fossil fuels. So I am confident in telling you that that emissions reduction has been achieved by real emissions reduction, in terms of replacing high-carbon power generation with low-carbon power generation, and now increasingly the electrification of other parts of the economy. James, have you anything to add?

That is all correct. The only thing I would add is that since 2008, when the Climate Change Act came in, consumption emissions have basically been flat. So, we are not bringing in higher consumption emissions, as it were, embedded in the things that we import. It is not coming down, but it is basically flat, while domestic emissions have come down very sharply over that period.

What degree of those consumption reductions have been due to the fact that we are not consuming a lot of energy through steel, aluminium, and some of the other heavy consumers that have now disappeared?

There is an element of emissions reductions from the industry sector. Obviously with steel, there is a particular point that the blast furnaces at Port Talbot have shut and the electric arc furnace is now under construction. There will be small emissions related to that electric arc furnace that will start when it starts up in 2027 or 2028, so there is a temporary gap there. But most of that reduction is a genuine change in the technology by which we make steel, which will be much less emissions-intensive. So you are right, but mostly what you are right about is the period before the Climate Change Act 2008. At that period, we saw significant reductions in industrial output as a country—not particularly driven by climate policy, which was not especially strong back then,but actually industrial output and consumption emissions are pretty flat since then.

To add to that, because James raised Port Talbot, we are clear in the advice that for our industrial clusters and places where there are energy-intensive industries, Port Talbot is a model of how not to do decarbonisation. It should have been possible to offer those workers in that plant a clear transition over to the electric arc furnaces. We signalled that in progress reports previously and in the Wales advice. So there is a good way of doing industrial decarbonisation, and we have flagged that we didn’t think Port Talbot was the right way to do it.

You have already mentioned some good news on EVs, but following the concessions made to the zero-emission vehicle mandate back in April, you have downgraded your assessment from credible plans to significant risks. Should the Government reverse this move? If not, are there other measures that could compensate for it?

There is a mix of different things here. Some parts of that score have gone up, and some have gone down. The first thing is that the 2030 phase-out date has been reinstated. We welcome that and that has improved the scores. We do worry that some flexibilities introduced might create an incentive for manufacturers to sell more plug-in hybrids, because the flexibilities exaggerate the emissions reductions that are associated with plug-in hybrids, so that has increased the risk. It has only been a few months, but so far that risk has not really materialised. We have seen increasing sales this year of battery electric vehicles. As Emma said earlier, they have gone up from 19.5% last year; this year to date, they are at 22%. Actually this last month—and we are seeing the electric car grant come in as well—they are at 26.5%. August is a small month in terms of vehicle sales, so I would caution over-interpreting that, but we are still seeing really positive steps on electric vehicles. As long as that continues you don’t need to change the policy again, but we have said that Government should keep it under review and make sure that this does not have a perverse effect.

Studies have shown that the real-world emissions from hybrid vehicles are often 3.5 times the laboratory value. Are hybrids part of the journey towards sustainable motoring, or are they part of the problem?

As you say, their emissions are typically much higher than some of the modelling, and not that different to a petrol or diesel car. The way I think about it is that you see these kinds of hybrid technologies in technology transitions from time to time. I am old enough to remember when VHS cassettes were bundled with DVDs; you get these kinds of technologies. They normally fade away in the market pretty quickly as the better technology comes through. So we are broadly confident that electric vehicles are just a much better technology and having two motors in your car is probably not going to survive, but it is not really as helpful as some people would like to make out.

When we have worked out what cars apply to it, what effect do you think the EV subsidy announced in July is going to have?

As I say, we have only got this one month of data and it is a small sales month, but it is a very encouraging single data point. I would not over-interpret that, in that you can get more volatility in the data in these small months, but it will help. We know that price is important with this, and that as the price of electric vehicles falls, take-up is rising, which potentially accelerates that process. The other thing is, consumers may be waiting for prices to fall before buying. To some extent this can kind of accelerate that process to say, “Look, actually, you can have next year’s price this year, so why not go out and buy?”

Active travel and the modal shift can obviously, hopefully, play an important role in reducing emissions from surface transport. Does local government have sufficient funding mechanisms and the powers for the UK to match European neighbours such as Germany and the Netherlands in that regard?

You have hit on something important here, which is that the numbers that we have set out in our pathway will require investment in both active travel and mass transit, particularly in cities, where most of that change in our pathway comes from. There was a big announcement around that in the spending review, so that is encouraging, and there are things you can do reasonably quickly here. You can roll out electric buses and even something like a tram—it only took three years to build the first tram line in Manchester. There are experiments in the West Midlands with ultralight trams that cut down the amount of streetworks that you need to do. So there are potentials here, and we have seen that in some cities in the UK, particularly here in London, and in other cities across Europe. So it can play its role, and we certainly hope it does.

From an analytical point of view, we were concerned that there was an inference that we had not looked at UK cities in producing the numbers we did. We looked at London, Bristol and York, and as James says, there are good cases in places like Manchester for what can be achieved. So we were informed by evidence from UK cities, as well as what has happened in other countries.

Just on EV sales, one thing that has been raised with us that does not seem to be being discussed so much by Government is the second-hand market in electric vehicles. We have heard a number of representations, particularly from the fleet sector, that the size of the drop-off in the value of second-hand electric vehicles in comparison to their petrol alternatives is one of the things that means that some people choose not to make that decision. The fleet industry particularly is concerned that the size of that drop-off makes the vehicle less attractive. Ultimately, how much you pay for the vehicle in the first point is only so important in comparison to how much you end up being able to sell it for in two or three years’ time. Should Government be taking measures to try to encourage people to buy second-hand ones as well as new ones, or are you fairly blasé about all of that, Dr Richardson?

It is slightly double-edged. Those lower prices in the second-hand market are encouraging people to buy second-hand electric vehicles. That is where most of the population buy their cars, so it means that for most people, EVs have actually become very affordable, and that is very encouraging. But you are right about how that affects the new price if I finance. There is a degree to which this is an inevitable feature of what happens when the price of a new product is falling, because that depreciation over time is not just the physical depreciation; you also have that reduction in the price of the new vehicle with which the second-hand vehicle is competing. So as long as the price of new vehicles continues to fall very sharply, almost inevitably this effect will be seen in terms of the depreciation rate, because you are catching up with that as you go along. We would expect to see price parity in the new market over the next two or three years, and thereafter probably the falls in new prices will be less steep. Therefore, this effect will probably naturally be ameliorated. But if the Government were to do anything, it probably is the electric car grant that actually we have already seen.

One of the arguments that I continue to hear against EV ownership is the disposal of the batteries, and I wondered whether either or both of you had any thoughts along those lines?

People should not see disposal of the batteries as being a problem. There are two things. First, the battery at the end of life of a car is still a useful piece of equipment; you can repurpose those batteries. You would not want to move them and disconnect them any more, but having that battery as a fixed asset—either in a home or on the grid—you can get quite a lot of further life out of that asset. So actually it is worth something; the car at end of life is worth more than a petrol car, which is basically just steel. We are also starting to see the recycling of batteries taking off. These are full of valuable materials, so there is a very strong incentive for people to recycle those materials. This is very different from petrol: when you have burnt it, you cannot get it back. You can recover, for example, lithium from a battery and put it into a new battery. As we are starting to see very early batteries from cars that were sold in maybe 2010 starting to come towards that period, that infrastructure is starting to get developed. So we would expect to see both second use and the recycling market to keep these valuable materials in the economy.

You were talking about the difference between the laboratory performance of hybrid vehicles on emissions and their actual real-world performance. We are all conscious of after-the-event legal cases being raised on diesel vehicles—it was found that they had been mis-sold. Are we likely to see similar cases in a few years’ time on hybrid vehicles? Is this a scandal in the making, or is it just an honest mistake?

I have not seen any evidence to suggest that anyone is manipulating the data although, of course, it is hard to identify that. A lot of it is about, what are the actual behaviours of people who buy these cars? Do they drive them off the battery, or do they predominantly drive them off the petrol motor? Getting that factor wrong has a big impact on emissions. At the moment it looks like it is just a modelling mistake, and one that has been uncovered, about the behaviours of drivers, rather than anything untoward, but of course, you cannot rule those things out.

There was a point that we made in the progress report that the utility factor is being updated in the worldwide testing procedure. Our understanding is that the Government are intending to adopt that for other policies, but not for the ZEV mandate. There is a question for us about whether that should be included in the ZEV mandate too. But again, as James said, that is part of keeping the ZEV mandate under review and seeing what happens with hybrids. At the moment, it does not look like a concern. If it were to become a concern, that is something you can straightforwardly do.

To move on to the slightly different subject of residential buildings, the Government are thought to be considering energy bill discounts of £200 a year for households installing heat pumps, and I wondered whether you would welcome that. Or does that possibly risk being a benefit only for the middle classes who take advantage, further entrenching the perception that net zero is a cost to working people and that they cannot afford it?

I cannot comment on what the Government are going to do; we have not seen the Warm Homes Plan and we await it as eagerly as you do. However, I can talk through the structure of what such an incentive might do. We have called for Government to make electricity cheaper by removing these levies, policy costs, which are not part of the cost of generating additional electricity. There are a range of ways in which you could do that, which we have set out. One of those would be to allow people to say, “If I get a heat pump, then I do not pay the policy costs on the extra electricity that I use for that heat pump.” It might be bundled up and presented as a discount, but it is not fundamentally a discount; it is charging people the correct price for the additional electricity that they use. It is not a subsidy to that household; they would still be paying their existing share of those levies, which is the advantage of it. It means that there is no call on the Exchequer or other people, because the household continues to pay what it is paying today, but it does not have that additional cost. In terms of the impact of that on the distribution, it is important that we do not see heat pumps as a technology for the rich. There is quite a lot of support out there for lower-income households: you can get heat pumps on the eco scheme, and there are grants for social housing. In many ways the households that are easiest to put heat pumps in are, roughly speaking, a post-1970s semi-detached house that has a hot water tank. I do not want to stereotype, but to me, that does not scream the richest people in society. For a house like that, you can probably put in a heat pump just for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme amount, because there is not a lot of extra work to do, and the pump itself is not a huge expense for a medium-sized house. Some of the most expensive houses to do are actually the big houses that one imagines better-off people live in. It is really important that we have heat pumps for all.

I have a background in the construction industry, so forgive me. There is an interesting point that has come up quite often: a lot of the volume house builders have been talking about the fact that heat pumps take up quite a lot of space. You said semi-detached is perfect. Certainly in their most economy houses, for example, terraced are much more difficult to do—they are finding that they don’t have the physical space. Up until now, they felt that the support was very much based on an existing technology—heat pumps—and that there are other zero technologies out there that are more appropriate for their smaller dwellings that they would be keen to be able to use; but of course there is no funding for that. That brings me on to the question of the reports that the Government could bring in air-to-air heat pumps, as well as the water-based heat pumps, which means you would not need the water tank. What do you think are the risks and benefits of providing scope within the boiler upgrade scheme for the air-to-air system, which of course could be used for cooling? Do you think perhaps that the whole upgrade system ought to make it easier for other innovative zero technologies to be able to access that scheme, because it is currently incredibly difficult due to it all seeming to be very tailored towards heat pumps being the answer?

There are two things there. For new builds, it should just be part of the build. We should not be providing Government subsidy to developers to install low-carbon heating into those homes instead of putting in a boiler that the owner will have to replace at some point. It is not more expensive to put in low-carbon heating when the home is being built; there is no retrofit involved. So, the subsidy question does not really arise for new builds; we should just be putting them in at the moment. Too many new homes still have gas boilers going in, which is just a cost to the person buying that home. It is true that for some properties space is an issue. It is mostly flats rather than terraces where you get that problem. For flats, a communal heat network-type system will probably be the best option in most cases. Those systems are hard to retrofit, but if you are building new, you can put that in and provide a heat pump solution. There will be some properties for which heat pumps are not suitable, but they are so much more efficient than the alternative low-carbon technologies that you really want to use them as often as possible. In terms of air-to-air, there is a case for including those within the boiler upgrade scheme as long as people are removing their fossil-fuelled heating system and not just installing air-con. They provide cooling as well as heating, which is an advantage, particularly if you have a large open-plan space like a modern flat; it can be a pretty efficient technology to use in those cases. There is also a role for that technology in things like public buildings. We need to decarbonise the heating in schools, but we also do not want kids being taught in a classroom when it is 40 degrees outside without some kind of cooling. Getting both heat and cool done as a one-off in those kinds of buildings is a big opportunity.

There is an advantage in that the air-to-air heat pump system install is considerably less expensive than the water system, especially in small spaces where that works quite successfully. I am really pleased that you think it is worth including. Does your analysis of the emissions of residential buildings take into account the fact that cooling is going to be much more of an issue as we go forward—especially in new builds, which tend to be quite reasonably well-insulated and therefore the heating is not such an issue?

Our building model has a lot of different building types in it, all of which have different solutions. Our approach to that cooling demand is mostly done through our electricity supply modelling because that is where it shows up as an additional summer demand on the system. So we include an allowance for additional electricity use in summer. Thankfully, that is a relatively easy demand to meet because you can meet that pretty well with a combination of solar and batteries. That is fairly distributed, so it has less of an impact on the grid than winter demand. It is going to be a source of extra demand, but it is by no means the most difficult to meet. Of course, that will be combined with passive measures. Not everybody needs to get active measures, but it will be part of the solution.

Regarding land use, what are the most important factors to consider in attempting to ramp up tree planting to the required levels?

Before I answer that, can I just add that you sound like one of the rare people who would enjoy downloading the buildings model for the seventh carbon budget, which has all 10,000 building archetypes and the modelling inputs to that. I just wanted to say that you can find all of our analysis online and in the published methodology report, so that is available to you as parliamentarians too.

You are absolutely right: I would very much enjoy it, thank you.

Yes, that is for you, and anyone else who wants it.

Is that supposed to be a compliment?

It is in our world.

I think it is, yes—“Sarah, we recognise you as a geek”, so yes, thank you.

It is all there; feel free. On the land use and tree planting, we had the highest tree planting rate since the 1990s last year. Rates almost doubled in Scotland and we had a 45% increase in tree planting in England. We think that is a clearer signalling of the grants and incentives, extending the permitting period in Scotland and taking action just to simplify that for the people doing tree planting, so it is easier to know where you need to go for grants and delivery. It is important to say that the high rates of tree planting in the 1970s and 1980s that are often talked about were achieved by incentives given to the agroforestry industry. They were for production of timber and other forestry services, often at the expense of peatlands or moorlands, and the idea was to have cheap forestry over other uses of land. So the planting then, which people can probably remember, was dominated by non-native conifers on big agroforestry sites. The forestry and woodland in the seventh carbon budget and the kinds of tree planting that we recommend are much more about the right tree in the right place; so more broadleaf, therefore more biodiversity, more resistance to pests and so on. The other thing that is always worth saying about tree planting is that it takes those kinds of trees 25 years to reach maturity, so there is a ramp-up rate in our modelling out to about 2036, which is when we are expecting the peak of tree planting to be done. But if it takes 25 years for a tree to mature, we clearly need to plant trees in the next decade for 2050. So, based on the overall planting rates evidence from last year, the rates in the seventh carbon budget look feasible, and although it is different in terms of the sorts of trees that we are proposing and where they are planted, that experience in the 1970s and 1980s tells you that we can ramp up to the rates that we need as well.

You have also answered my next question, but I will now turn to Dr James. There is evidence that tree mortality rates are growing. What consideration has the Climate Change Committee given to tree mortality rates in its analysis and modelling?

I am the tree person, if that is all right—not that James would not do it.

By all means.

We factor in tree mortality in the land use statistics: we use forestry statistics in the progress reports. Those assume that if you lose trees for felling or mortality they are replaced. The tree planting rates that we are recommending are additional to that, so there is assumed mortality in those figures. Our woodland creation numbers are additional to that.

Does that account for the large-scale mortality we have seen on some roadside schemes?

There are no nationally held statistics about tree planting mortality; that there is no national metric is an issue we have. But what you can see in the seventh carbon budget is an acknowledgment that if you plant trees to be diverse and biodiverse, that helps to give resilience to many of the issues that give rise to tree mortality in the kinds of places you are talking about. We are talking about sustainable woodland management increasing from 20% to 80% native broadleaf. These are about native woodlands and trees planted with hedgerows on farmland and so on. That diversity of planting and more thoughtful planting approach also helps with reducing tree mortality. We have tried to think about tree mortality in the advice, and we are confident that the numbers we are giving you include that additional tree planting rate.

I was going to try to be inclusive, Dr James, but I have one more question for Emma. What is required of the Land Use Framework to ensure that it is able to drive the change needed on the ground?

The Land Use Framework is spatial, which is a good thing. It takes the top-line needs of things like climate adaptation, food security and nature at national level and applies them more locally. It is currently unclear what that will mean in terms of delivery on the ground—how that will that interact with some of the agriculture schemes and incentives. One thing I would say on this from our point of view is that in the evidence sessions we held for the seventh carbon budget a lot of stakeholders, particularly in the farming community, were saying the important thing for them is that it is not broad brush: that you don’t go region by region, that things like change in land use on a particular farm needs to be thoughtful so that you don’t have areas where there is a huge change, but it is a farm-by-farm approach and it is a sensitive conversation. It is important for policymakers to understand that it needs to reflect that that was what they told us.

The committee on climate change’s consistent headline recommendation for some time—including in the seventh carbon budget—has been to bring down electricity prices, and we know that is absolutely critical for taking people with us, families and businesses alike. When questioned in April about how quickly progress is needed to happen for this not to threaten the delivery of the balanced pathway, you said, “As soon as possible.” How is it going five months on, and how worrying or how critical is this at this point in time?

I think you can hear that cheap electricity is a critical issue outside of the need to decarbonise—you will know that as parliamentarians. We have just seen the price cap go up again. When you step back and look at it, there is very little that you can do, certainly quickly, on the wholesale costs of energy, which is feeding through to the bills. It is important to say that since the introduction of the price cap, 88% of the rise in bills has come from the cost of wholesale gas and electricity; it tracks the gas price, as I am sure you know. It is hard to change that in the short term; you have to effectively displace gas in the economy. That is mostly what you can do in the UK on the wholesale price. But there are surcharges added to the unit cost of electricity—policy costs—and we have talked about them. That is why our main recommendation is to remove those policy costs, because it is a straightforward thing to do relative to the change in the wholesale cost. That would do two things: first, it would immediately reduce bills, but secondly, the bigger concern for us is incentivising the demand side—electrification—so it helps people who are getting electric vehicles make even bigger savings immediately, it helps with the economics of a heat pump and it helps with a lot of the core technologies we are asking people to adopt. If you look at emissions reduction ahead, as I said at the beginning, this Government have made some positive progress in talking about power generation, but we have not heard anywhere near the same amount on the demand side, and in particular on heat, although they have the Warm Homes Plan coming, which we will be looking at closely. The previous Government had accepted that proposal from the Climate Change Committee but had not acted on it. We have not seen action from this Government on removing the levies, with the exception that there was some change to the levies faced by industrial users in the industrial strategy, which is good, so there has been progress there. We need to see something done for households. In terms of delivery, the indicators on things like electric vehicles, where if you have off-street parking you are probably already saving money when you charge your vehicle, relative to driving an internal combustion engine vehicle, you can see that we are getting the roll-out of those technologies. For heat, it helps the economics of heat pumps and electric heating considerably. Again, there was a 56% increase in heat pumps last year, so no sign yet that it is affecting delivery, but it is about the most efficient way of doing the transition. Electricity is the fuel of the future in this economy, and it should be as cheap as possible for both households and businesses.

As we know, there has been a letter recently between the shadow Secretary of State for Energy, Claire Coutinho, and your new chair, Nigel Topping—who we have had before this Committee before he was appointed as well—where it has been alleged that the independent advice by the committee on climate change is misleading in terms of the way it is handling these costs for the acceleration away from gas, in terms of renewable energy costs in the auction. What is the committee on climate change’s response to those kinds of direct allegations?

The first thing to say is that I know the shadow Secretary of State well from my previous job, and it is actually nice to have her back. On that letter, our chair asked for a meeting to go line by line through our analysis with the shadow Secretary of State, as we did with Andrew Bowie at the time of the publication of the seventh carbon budget. We are very happy to do that, and I do not want to preclude what Nigel might say in that regard. Because it is a relatively serious thing to say about an independent body, one important thing to put on the record is that you can find how we have done our analysis on electricity supply, as with our buildings model. In the letter that Nigel wrote to the shadow Secretary of State he referenced the methods report, which was published after the seventh carbon budget, in which you can find the reference to the AFRY BID3 model, which is the model we used to do our electricity supply modelling. You can find every input listed in the methods document—I think it is page 33 onwards, niche, but there you go—that we looked at in doing that modelling. You can find how we have treated things like balancing and systems costs in the methods document. You can also download, half-hourly by half-hourly, the dataset that went into our energy system modelling. You are perfectly able to replicate those results in the commercial system models available, so it is all there. I would just say that the idea there is anything that we have been misleading or not transparent about is incorrect, and I would encourage you all to read that letter, which lays out some of how we treat things like levelised costs versus strike prices, balancing costs and so on, but also point you to the cache of information online that you can look at on how we have done our energy supply modelling.

Yes, and so Chair, it is very important that we have all that correspondence and can point to it. We have read it, but if we are going to take the public with us then we have to make sure that we are confident in the advice that the committee on climate change is giving us. I find it quite serious that it is being challenged in that way, so it is good that they are having the meeting, and that we get all that evidence by the committee on climate change in front of us.

The other thing it is important to add is these are good questions, and it is good to ask about the difference between strike prices and levelised costs, which is what the Shadow Secretary of State wrote to us about. These are complex issues that it is worth debating. The other thing to point to in the seventh carbon budget advice is there is a whole chapter in it on how we handle uncertainties. We are comfortable with the idea that aspects of our evidence are complex; we are modelling ranges and making assumptions, but the point is we are very transparent about the things that we are doing, so that you as parliamentarians can see those choices that we have made, and we can debate them. We will always keep all market evidence under review and then update our modelling appropriately. That is one of the strengths of the carbon budgets: every time we do one, we are updating things that we said five years ago based on what has happened in the real world. I am very confident, or as confident as any analyst will ever be, about what we say in our numbers. Most importantly of all, because we are taking the long view, we can be very confident in saying to you that the costs of decarbonisation start to get outpaced by savings from about 2040. A lot of the cost is in this decade, and we are up front about that, but then there are considerable savings from using modern, efficient technologies across the energy system, which we can also show you. So in that sense, we have done the job that you need us to do.

I will bring in Sammy in a moment, but anyone listening to what you said, Emma, who was not an energy expert, might really have struggled to understand. This comes back to what we were talking about previously: you are an adviser to us as parliamentarians, but you are also there to support a wider knowledge of these issues. The whole issue of the difference between the levelised cost of energy and the strike price was something that gained significant traction online and very much undermined the confidence and belief in what the Government were putting about. I entirely understand you wishing to steer clear of getting into who is right and who is wrong, but I think it is really important that you are able to explain the difference to people. We accept that you do not believe that you misled people. You are able to explain the difference between what you see as an appropriate cost of energy for offshore wind and, as the Shadow Secretary of State was saying, “Well, this is what you are going to pay people for it, so why is that not what you are claiming the cost is?” For those watching our proceedings, can you just try to explain what the letter was attempting? The letter touched upon some of that, but also said, “Well, you can go and look at all these other documents if you wish to.” In the simplest terms imaginable, can you just explain the difference between the levelised cost of electricity and the strike price?

They are two different things. It is important to say that even the levelised cost figure that we give is an output; it is not modelling input. It tells you things like the costs of installing a technology, and the costs of operating the technology over time. It is an international metric, so it enables us to look at what we say in the UK versus other markets, which is important, and it allows us to look at technologies that can be very different side by side. So it is the metric commonly used in energy analysis. The contracts for difference and the renewables auction strike prices are commercial contracts, like capacity market contracts for gas generation and other systems services. In that auction strike price, which is the result of the auction, there are all kinds of commercial considerations, which can be opaque because they are about risk. They are about what private sector developers think the risk is on a particular project—what is their particular project like to build and develop? What do they need back to enable them to carry the risk of developing a project that size? These are big projects: new turbines are the size of skyscrapers built out at sea, so they are quite different things. Market data is one of the inputs that we use when we are thinking about our levelised costs. Market prices—actual real-world prices—are included in our analysis, as are system costs, importantly, so you can compare one kind of technology to another, how much it costs and what the fuel input is over time. But the really important thing is to see what it all looks like when you add different kinds of technologies together. What does the overall power system look like? What is the least cost? For that reason you can, for example, have a more expensive technology in your energy mix because it makes it cheaper to run the system overall. These things are about balancing costs. How do you balance the system for when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing? Do you need different kinds of generation on to support renewables? What is the role of nuclear power, for example? Do you have to consider things like constraint costs? All that is included in the modelling that we do as well. We also model seasonally across the year, because there are different weather conditions in a year. The point is you can find a lot of how we thought about that in the methodology document. I realise it is complicated—energy is a complex sector—but I sometimes worry that in that complexity, people are being misled about the end result. The last thing to say is, the end result is the important thing for us. We are clear in our evidence that, relative to a fossil fuel counterfactual—continuing energy systems similar to the one today and continuing to use gas in our heating and continuing to use fossil fuels in vehicles—for households and the wider economy, there are savings to be made from switching to cheap electricity. Although forward energy prices are always difficult, we also think that energy costs are lower in that system by the time you get to 2050 than they would be if we stayed as normal. Very lastly, we are planning to do some more work on this, so if that was not a good enough go at explaining it simply, we are going to do more on energy costings; we know that you need that sort of information. Again, the questions are the right ones; this is the sort of interrogation that is appropriate.

I noted that you point out that overall this mix should result in lower electricity prices by 2050, compared to what we have at present. But, of course, we are concerned and the public are concerned about what happens to energy prices this year and next year. The fact is they have been going up, and while gas may have peaked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fossil fuels are down considerably, and are much lower now. The bills which people receive at present are made up by at least 60%, maybe more, of the kind of policy decisions made by Government, whether that is the social costs, the carbon taxes or the cost of strengthening the network. We are building wind farms where we do not actually need the energy, so we have to put the systems in place, and I believe the regulator said we need £80 billion to strengthen the system, excluding what strengthening is needed for heat pumps and cars. Now, to entice wind energy companies in, we are giving them guaranteed prices for a long time that are above what the cost of fossil fuels would be if we were relying more on them. The more wind we build and the less connected it is to the grid, the more we are going to spend on constraint payments, and it is anticipated that that could rise up to £1 billion a year. There are other factors as well. Given those facts—given the infrastructure costs, the guaranteed prices you will have to give, the constraint payments, and the conversion costs with putting more renewables into the system, how do you reach the conclusion that people will face lower electricity bills in the future—and how long will it be before they face lower electricity bills?

There is a simple answer to this question; then I will go into some of the points you made. This is the simple answer from last time: these are modern, and therefore more efficient, technologies. In an energy system of putting clean power generation on one end of the system and then, importantly, using it efficiently across the system—so using electricity in your home—we halve energy losses in an energy system like that, because you are not doing the conversion or using a molecule and electricity. It is just a very simple case of generating electricity and using it. Heat pumps and electric vehicles convert that fuel more usefully than for fossil fuels. So in the long run the physics of the system and the costs in the long run are in your favour. Where the cost comes from, as you say, is that you have to build that system, and we don’t shy away from that in the seventh carbon budget advice. It is an invest-to-save model, no question. So you have to build your new infrastructure and your grid, as you say, and people have to have the electric technologies in their homes in order to be able to take advantage. But once you have done that, which is largely a one-off upgrade like we did the gas grid in the 1970s, or the dash for gas in the 1980s and 1990s, you then have that infrastructure and start to get the savings of using those technologies. By the way, we modelled the savings out to 2050 because of the Climate Change Act, but those savings will continue beyond it. So, that is the picture. In terms of some points about the energy system, the increased costs in the renewables auction, it is important to say that some of those strike prices are being faced by the developers of gas plants, or other plants. Some things that have caused prices to go up are supply chain constraints. Some of those supply chains are the same for if you are trying to build a new CCGT and your gas-fired power station as a renewables plant: there are labour costs and the costs of inflation. Infrastructure developers of all kinds are facing these costs. We will be interested to see the market data on that coming forward, and then we will be able to give you a relative sense of that differential. Policy costs on the bill are about 20% at the moment, I think, James? I used to know that off the top of my head.

That is about right. There are also some costs that are rather buried in there from all the companies that went bust on the back of the Ukraine shock; that is an indirect cost from the gas price reliance. Unfortunately, we have not been able to get an estimate, but it is not a small amount.

Yes. Those costs are the ones that we are talking about when we suggest moving the levies off bills. Those costs will also go down over time because a lot of that cost comes from the early-stage renewables projects when these technologies were not at scale in the market—things like the renewables obligation and the feed-in tariff. We are expecting those to come off bills. Lastly, we recognise your question, which is that the Government have to have a solution to spread those costs fairly and manage them for the bit where we are building the system. In the seventh carbon budget we say that the fastest thing we think you can do is remove the levies, and there are options for Government about how they do that. But from about 2040, savings in the economy from doing this start outpacing the investment, and will carry on. So, like the other infrastructure upgrades we have done in the past to the benefit of the UK, such as the gas fire bill and switching over from town gas to methane—it is that sort of thinking. We don’t by any means shy away from the fact that that means finding the investment. Very lastly, most of that investment will not be fiscal; it is private sector investment. In the seventh carbon budget, 60% to 95% of that capital cost will be met from the private sector. Circling right back round, that is why instruments like the contract for difference auction in the past have been more effective than, say, just Government subsidy, because they are a way of reducing the risk to investors but enabling private sector competition.

How do you view the potential of novel carbon removal technologies such as biochar and enhanced rock weathering? Could these offer better value for money in the long term than things like BECCS and DACCS?

It is a very nascent area, and it is potentially quite exciting. We have introduced a small amount of those technologies into our modelling this time. We did not have them in the sixth carbon budget, which reflects growing levels of research and understanding around those technologies. So it may be that those, or even more nascent technologies that we have not thought are sufficiently developed to include at this point, come forward between now and 2050. One of the things that you see when you have a big problem that lots of people are trying to solve is that sometimes people solve it in a way you have not expected, and they can win the market if they are cheaper. So there is potential there. We need to understand the implications of those things for land use; for example, biochar is typically spread on the land. The research says it can enhance that land by holding more carbon in the land, but you have to put it on the right land, and we need to really understand that before we start doing these things at scale. But it is cheaper in our modelling than direct air capture particularly, so there is potential there.

Is there a future for DACCS in this country? Do you think that will be part of the solution?

We think it plays a role in dealing with the things that are hardest of all to decarbonise—predominantly aviation, where it is very difficult to come up with a technical solution that gets you 100% of the way. We think there are limits to how much of BECCS you can have while being sustainable on the biomass, and that brings in DACCS. That is contingent on the cost of DACCS falling, so we model learning rates and assume that those costs will fall. If that does not happen, that is where the opportunity for some of these alternative technologies comes in.

Could the establishment of a carbon removal budget help decide which methods of carbon removal should be prioritised in certain situations?

It is an interesting idea, but at this stage I am not sure you would want to do that. There are two things I would say. A lot of the advocates for it are worried that things like DACCS will substitute for mitigation, and it is fair to say that you do occasionally get people saying, “Oh no, we should not do electric vehicles or heat pumps or whatever; we should just rely on these kinds of technologies.” So I understand why people worry, but the reality is that the economics of electric vehicles and heat pumps will eat the economics of direct air capture for breakfast. These things are cheaper than obsolete fossil fuel technologies, and way cheaper than DACCS. So I am not super-worried that we will end up not having electric vehicles, heat pumps or renewables, because they are just the best option in the market. That will only leave a very small niche for DACCS, particularly around aviation and those most difficult things. But where you are using it, you probably want to have a trade-off between, say, sustainable aviation fuel, which would be on one half of that balance because it reduces emissions, and DACCS, which would be on the other half of that balance, in the carbon removal budget. If you separate them out into separate budgets it makes it harder to say, “Actually, we should have the solution here that is the lowest cost, rather than having an artificial divide between them.” So, there are some risks in separating them out.

I am pretty positive about carbon capture and storage, in particular the Peak Cluster project for the cement and lime industries; I just wanted to get that on record. Carbon capture is viewed by the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee as challenging and high-risk, and yet the Government are obviously committing billions of taxpayers’ pounds to pay for it. Would this funding be better spent on more proven technologies such as home insulation, heat pumps and electric vehicles?

You need to do both. One thing that has come up as an issue is that there is a very large headline number on CCS, but that is actually spread over 25 years, so on average it is less than £1 billion a year on CCS. The point with the CCS, which you raised yourself, is that there are certain industries—cement and lime is a key one—where we really do not have an alternative solution because of the underlying chemical processes, so without CCS we are left without a solution at all. If you want to make those things work for 2050 you need to start now, because they are complicated things, they will take time, and we will learn as we go along. We need to be doing those things alongside electric vehicles and heat pumps. We have some nice charts in our pathway that show that most of the heavy lifting over the next 10 years is undoubtedly done by the technologies that already exist and can be rolled out quickly at scale, particularly electric vehicles, heat pumps, renewables and batteries. But in order to be able to do the harder stuff at the end you need to start on these other things now, so inevitably it is both.

I will bring Pippa Heylings back in, and then we will move on to the adaptation session.

I just wanted to quickly come back on your points about contracts for difference, Emma. Could you perhaps give some reassurance to the Committee and others about how legally secure contracts secured under Allocation Round 7 (AR7) would be in the future, in terms of making sure we have a context of certainty for investment? What would be the implications if a future Government sought to cancel them or tear them up?

They are a legally binding contract between the Low Carbon Contracts committee and a private developer. I am not a lawyer, but I can tell you it would be difficult and expensive to undo that kind of contract.

Thank you. That brings the first half of this session to a close. We are going to take a very short break, and then touch upon the issue of adaptation for the final 45 minutes or so of this session. Sitting suspended for a short break. On resuming—

We now come to the second half of today’s session on adaptation. First, Emma Pinchbeck: all the CCC’s six adaptation progress reports since 2015 have had the same broad message—that adaptation progress is insufficient. What do you believe is the barrier to substantive progress on climate change adaptation in England?

I don’t mean this to sound punchy, but the mechanism for accountability in the Climate Change Act is that we give Parliament the information it needs to hold Government to account for delivery. As an independent advisory body, we don’t have teeth to make sure that what we are saying in the progress reports is turned into delivery. The mechanism is that we give you the information so that you can then hold Government to account. In terms of whether it is working, clearly we are not seeing the delivery we need on adaptation relative to what we are saying in either the risk assessment or the progress reports that look at delivery. There was a judicial review in 2024 on the third national adaptation programme which highlighted that the accountability process in the Climate Change Act is not prescriptive on the level of ambition and what the goal for adaptation should be—unlike for what we have, say, on the mitigation side with the carbon budgets. The thing that we think would bring a step change in how the advice given on adaptation actually turns into delivery is that we need objectives and targets for adaptation in this country. That would make it easier for us to monitor and evaluate, which makes the information that we give you more straightforward, which means you can then more effectively hold Government to account. The other thing that has merit for this is that we said in the progress report that the roles of Government, the private sector, local government, households and so on need to be much more clearly defined, because then it is not just what you are holding people to account to do, it is who is accountable for the action; and once those roles are defined, that should be really well communicated to those people.

The regular funding for the Adaptation Committee from DEFRA and the devolved Administrations is around one third to one quarter the level that DESNZ provides for the Mitigation Committee. Given the significant issues that successive Governments have had in developing adequate adaptation plans, and what you have just referred to, what issues do current funding arrangements cause in relation to adaptation progress scrutiny? Is this primarily a resources issue, or do you identify it as something different?

From the Climate Change Committee’s point of view in terms of the resources we get, we have been given sufficient funding and have that confirmed in order to do the work that Government have commissioned of us, which is to do the climate change risk assessment technical report and the climate change risk assessment advice, together with other statutory work which is the progress report. We have that for the financial year ’25-’26. Beyond that, the Departments are doing their business planning following the spending review, and we are speaking to DEFRA about what our settlement might look like. My observation as chief exec would be that the difference broadly between our mitigation and adaptation funding is that the mitigation funding allows for an established core team. To translate what that means for me, it means I have a staff that I can invest in over a period of years rather than for particular reports, which means we keep that expertise. We are meant to be this centre of analytical excellence. We do a good job with the resources we have, but if we had that consistent multi-year funding that enabled us to have that core team, it would make it much more straightforward to keep that expertise for multiple years, which gives us the depth that we need to advise you.

Have you communicated that to DEFRA?

We have communicated that to DEFRA.

Let me pick that up. There are some positives in there, for example the commitment to long-term floods capital spending. There is also a commitment that came out in the infrastructure strategy, but alongside that, to develop standards for infrastructure, which comes back to the point Emma was making about being clear about what you are trying to achieve. But it clearly could have had more. For a start, we just don’t know what the Government are spending on that climate adaptation; no figure is available for that. And we don’t know where the Government sees the boundary between what it is there to spend and what the private sector—households—are being asked to pay for. Not everything here is going to come down to public spending, but if you are asking other people to bear some of these costs, you have got to know where that boundary falls and what the Government are willing to provide. Unfortunately, we have not had that information, which is what we asked for in the progress report.

We do understand the Treasury made some efforts to collect that information. Some of it is inherently complicated because, for example, if I adapt a building, there is probably a benefit in terms of the use of the building as well as the adaptation. So some things overlap; you need to develop some methods for separating those things out. But it suggests a lack of focus on this as a key issue.

It is a good first step. The commission is actually for the planning assumptions for the Government to set adaptation objectives. Those are the degree of warming the country should prepare for on a risk basis, and the year that we think the Government should be preparing adaptation actions for. That lack of a benchmark has meant that you cannot, as I said, clearly set objectives across different areas of the economy. Without those objectives, it is harder to do the monitoring and evaluation on how progress is going. So, it is a good first step. Looking at the fact that the NAP have not been delivered to date, it is obvious that we need something better. We are hoping to use those planning assumptions in our advice to Government, and thereafter we would like to see a step change on adaptation planning in this country, and we have said that.

The committee will be minded to answer the Minister’s direct question, which is to give those two things—the date and the level of warming—to prepare for the planning assumptions and to say a little about what good could look like in adaptation when it responds. Given that the committee has not responded yet, I should probably not say more than that.

The commitment in the infrastructure strategy to developing resilience standards, together with this request which is part of developing an overarching objective, are both parts of what has been our biggest ask all along: that Government are clear about what they are trying to achieve. Equally, the infrastructure commitment is for 2030. There are things like the next water price review before that. It would be a real missed opportunity if you did not at least set out the standards in the water sector before you set the price review for the next five years. It feels a little like that timescale is a bit elongated. Perhaps Government are planning to do the more urgent bits first, and we would certainly encourage them to do so.

Just one follow-up on Martin’s question: sometimes the definition of adaptation is very vague, but what do you see as the priorities that the Government should be setting for adaptations? Is far too much priority given to mitigation and not enough attention to adaptation?

The most straightforward way to answer this would be to tell you that we are doing that for the first time in our advice to Government on adaptation. As a statutory body for adaptation, we are required to revise the climate change risk assessment every five years. Other countries with a national adaptation programme quite often have a sense of not just the risks but what the change looks like, and what a good, resilient country might look like. In our advice this time, we are producing the Well-Adapted UK report, which will describe what good adaptation looks like across things like health, transport systems, critical infrastructure, the economy, nature, land use and so on. You are right. That will help because the conversation about adaptation has not been as clearly defined as it could be; this is the Committee’s attempt to do that. We are still drafting that advice, so this might be another one, Chair, where we say you can very much have us back when that is published in the spring. But it looks at recognising this problem that adaptation is necessary even with the progress being made on mitigation, and it has not had the same policy attention or heft that mitigation has in Government.

When it comes to liaising with Departments that are most related to the work you are doing, how successful has that liaison been and how co-operative have Departments been?

We have good relationships at working level with our sponsoring Department for adaptation which, as you will know, is DEFRA. We have said in the adaptation progress report that one of the things that needs to change is that adaptation planning needs to become fundamental to more Departments than DEFRA, even if it stays as the sponsoring Department. The Institute for Government proposed options for reorganising adaptation work in the Government, including whether DEFRA, the Treasury or DESNZ becomes the sponsor. For us, it is about going to see the Secretaries of State and lead Departments. At the beginning of this evidence session, I mentioned health. Health is a critical one for adaptation. A lot of the risks that we are seeing are about health one way or the other. Similarly, with DCLG it is about communities and the built environment. Again, there is a need to go and see that Department. Some individual Departments have been forthcoming with us. The Department for Transport has made real progress on adaptation planning, and we have seen it. Lastly, some responsibility for climate change is held in the Cabinet Office through the Climate Resilience Board which is co-convened with DEFRA. In the progress report, we said that looks like a good thing to have done—Cabinet Office being cross-government—but we have not been able to assess its effectiveness because we have not been able to see how that is working inside. We have previously offered to attend as part of our auditing function for you, and we would be very happy to do that. There are some really strong relationships, some relationships that will need to be built, and definitely advice from the Committee to all of you as parliamentarians that adaptation is cross-government work that needs to be held across multiple Departments.

You have answered a number of the questions I had about other Government Departments and your relationship with the Climate Resilience Board. Have you actually met with it yet?

We have met with the Cabinet Office; and the Cabinet Office, along with DEFRA, have responsibility for the Climate Resilience Board. We have not attended a Climate Resilience Board. In the adaptation progress report, we said it looks like a useful cross-government initiative. It is the sort of thing that the committee has previously recommended Government do. We cannot fully assess its effectiveness for you because we have not seen it in action as it were, and we would be very happy to, if that is something you think would be sensible in our audit function.

One striking example that came out of the report was that when it came to climate resilience in the planning system, you were finding it difficult, if not impossible, to get the data on the number of houses that were being built in areas where there is risk of flooding. However, the number of planning applications that went against the EA reports on flooding had slightly increased. Is this intentional, or is it simply difficult to get the data across such a wide number of planning authorities?

I suspect it is more the latter than some kind of conspiracy by MHCLG to hide things. We don’t see any signs that this is severely going into reverse, although obviously without the data it is very hard to know that. This is important data for us, and we would certainly hope that it is just routinely published. But you are right; it needs to be collected across a lot of authorities, so it may simply be a resourcing question within the Department.

What do you need to know from the Climate Resilience Board? Is it simply a case of attending their meetings and hearing what is being discussed, or is there particular information that you would require from the board?

It is an interesting question. There are two questions. First, is it functioning: which Departments are on it, and what level of officials are involved—are they effective conversations? More broadly than that, we have advised Government that setting objectives, being clear about measuring progress, and tightening up what they are trying to achieve with adaptation is important. If the Climate Resilience Board is doing any of that work, that would also be interesting to see. DEFRA has given us the commission for starting that process, but it would be interesting to know whether any of that thinking is happening in that other group. The sorts of things we would look at are the detail of how they are doing the measurement, what sort of things they are looking at, and which Departments are involved.

In terms of resilience and adaptation, would you see the board as complementing the contact that you have with individual Departments on what it is achieving? Are you aware of that?

Yes, it is a complement. I would also note that the Cabinet Office is likely looking at areas of risk that sit outside the Climate Change Committee’s remit—things like national security and so on. It is fine to have something additional, and absolutely appropriate to have a cross-government group drawing Departments together. That is something that the Committee has called for. However, it would be interesting for us to be able to judge whether it is effective so that we can report to you. That is the point: just being able to tell you whether we think it is a good forum or not. We honestly don’t feel we have enough information about it to give you a full picture.

Is the best way of getting that information to attend the board meetings or get reports from the board meetings?

Seeing things happen in live time is often useful. It is why you do oral evidence sessions as well as written ones. For us, of course there is something about seeing it, but a more detailed conversation and data about what they are looking at would be helpful too.

Drilling down a little on the flooding side, which my colleagues have mentioned, the committee’s assessment on the progress on flooding is relatively positive, yet England continues to see serious and repeated floods. Is there a contradiction here? Could you explain that contradiction?

Some of it lies in the use of the word “relatively”. You are comparing things where there is at least understanding, data and action, against areas where even those things are missing. We have seen a substantial increase in the floods budget. Some of that has been eroded due to inflation and that has caused us to downgrade some of our scores, but we do see action. We were encouraged by the fact—back to the spending review—that there is now an emphasis on increased maintenance spending. We have seen a lot of assets being eroded by those floods and not enough spending to pick that up. There now seems to be an understanding in Government of the importance of that, but the simple truth is we are running uphill and we are still not running fast enough.

The report recommends the use of resilience standards in some contexts, especially with infrastructure, as you just mentioned, but not for people’s homes in relation to flood risk. What is the Committee’s perspective on the value of using resilience standards as an approach for flood risk management?

Across the piece, we really see value in clarity about what Government are trying to achieve, and there are two reasons for that. First, it allows you to assess what Government themselves are doing. Is the budget for the Environment Agency large enough? Are they prioritising schemes that will deliver that objective? At the moment we cannot do this. We get these measures of additional homes, but it does not tell you how many are falling out the back. You can really push Government to do what it is trying to do if it sets out what it is trying to do. Secondly, some of this may involve property-level resilience, individual action, or actions by businesses. If those people are to know what is expected of them, they have to know what they can rely on the Government to do. At the moment, that boundary is unclear. Perhaps unsurprisingly, lots of households think this is not really their job. Even relatively simple measures, like air bricks that can be closed, have pretty low take-up. If we were clearer with people and told them, “Actually, if you live in these places you probably need to do some of these things yourself,” it would help them to take them up. Maybe Government need to push the insurance companies and so on to help with that and not just leave it to households. But actually, they might say they cannot pay for all that, so somewhere else in the system has to pay, but you have to know where that boundary lies or you cannot really expect people to take action on either side of it.

Yes, more clarity of the information, so that they know what their obligations are, or what their position is. What effect did the new national flood risk assessment have on your assessment of the flood-related outcomes? Did you amend your approach, given the new dataset and the considerable increase in the number of properties that were at risk of flood?

Particularly on the surface water side?

Yes.

It is really welcome that we have this better data. It does not fundamentally affect our assessment because the number of properties that are being flooded, as it were, is the same independently of the update in the data, the budgets and so on. But it is certainly useful for showing the gap on that surface water side of things, which is a big issue where we don’t have the same kind of central programme that you have with the Environment Agency.

On this new dataset, there are properties recorded as at risk of flooding that would not have been on the previous information, are there not?

Certainly on surface water, yes.

Yes, sorry—specifically on surface water.

You get a much larger number, so the risk is higher. We kind of knew that was true. What we now have are the metrics to demonstrate it, which is really valuable.

In a way, would you say that your assessment already included that surface water flooding, even though you did not have the data for it before, because you sort of knew it was there?

We kind of knew that this was an issue. We now have a much clearer view of exactly where it is an issue.

That makes sense. It is nice to have the data to back up what you already thought.

Yes.

Good. How does the complicated distribution of flood risk management responsibility across different authorities and organisations impact the committee’s ability to access all the relevant policies and strategies?

It works reasonably well on rivers and the sea. It is complicated, but fundamentally you have the Environment Agency at the heart of it. Although it complicates things because it has to work with local authorities and so on, it also has benefits because you can get schemes that achieve multiple things. You actually want the local authority, Network Rail, the local communities, or whoever it is, at the table; you will get a better scheme in the end. It can perhaps take a bit longer, but actually there are multiple benefits. You still have that key driving force in the Environment Agency. It works less well, again, for the surface water issue. Local authorities are the lead: that is clear. However, the assets involved are often split between the local authorities and the water companies. Those water company assets are doing drainage and sewerage, but they can only really—

Highways?

Highways as well, if it is National Highways. Obviously, a lot of highways sit with local authorities. But yes, National Highways and then Network Rail and so on come into it, particularly with those water assets because they are dual use. There is a funding boundary problem because they are funded for the sewerage function, but if it is drainage it is less clear who is supposed to pay for that. You have a problem that lots of local authorities are clearly very heavily stretched; this is one of a large number of priorities for them. Some local authorities are doing better than others, but it is a real challenge.

Did the committee feel confident in assessing the Environment Agency’s national river and coastal strategy in a consistent way with all the lead local authorities’ surface water flooding strategies? Did you feel confident that you were assessing it, given all these anomalies and different lead authorities’ abilities to deliver?

As I say, on the surface water side it is much harder to get a handle on what is going on and to have a clear picture than it is on the rivers and coastal side. We would certainly be more comfortable if we had better data about activities that are taking place there. They are inherently more fragmented. Surface water is a very local issue; it can be a very small area so it is harder to collect that data. But yes, it is much harder for us to have a clear picture about what is being done there than it is with the Environment Agency, which is basically a partner in most of what is happening on rivers and the sea. If you look at them, you get a pretty good picture of everything that is happening within England.

That makes a lot of sense. It is slightly worrying that we do not have the flooding for surface water under control, but thank you. Jumping from water to heat—our extreme heat resilience, what data is required in order to evaluate overheating prevalence in homes in England? What data and data collection measures are currently missing? How do you think this can be addressed?

In the progress report, we commented on the lack of good data and metrics for overheating. There are a few datasets that give snapshot conditions. The ones that we use—the English Housing Survey and the Energy Follow Up Survey—tell us about some households. There is a figure in the adaptation progress report that says 12% of households in the English Housing Survey talk about at least one part of their home being uncomfortably hot, which has increased from 2022, so we can see a change there. Similarly, the Energy Follow Up Survey gave us the information about people’s nighttime temperatures for sleeping. It showed that 3% of main bedrooms in houses and 10% in flats had nighttime temperatures that exceeded 29 degrees through the summer 2018 heatwave. We have some other datasets outside that on overheating for public sector and other buildings. The Department for Education has research on the impact of extreme overheating in schools. We lose about 1.7 days of schooling every year to overheating events and 4.3% cumulative learning time. There is data out there that we have used. The problem is that none of the datasets provide an up-to-date picture of how overheating in the building stock is changing. Critically, it is difficult to get the change over time. The other missing data is around cooling measures in schools: which measures are being taken, and whether people are putting in passive or active cooling, such as air conditioning or shutters. There are no national datasets for community-level responses to cooling for overheating, such as green spaces in urban environments. We made some recommendations in the progress reports and would welcome any further ideas about what we can do about this. We suggested post-occupancy evaluations of new-build homes. For example, as people move out, actually assessing what the lived experience was of the building as opposed to the designed experience, and ensuring that homes meet Part O of the building regulations when they are built. You could use the existing Energy Follow Up Survey as a tool to track overheating in homes over time. We have 2022-23 figures, for example. Our understanding is that the Health and Safety Executive and DESNZ are looking at this and thinking about further metrics, so there are possible other solutions to this. But that is what we meant in the progress report about the lack of metrics.

Does the fact that you do not have up-to-date data mean that you are missing an opportunity to develop recommendations with elements that might adapt, whether they are, as you said, nature-based solutions for external spaces, external protection for west-facing windows, or any of the other obvious things?

There is quite good data out there, for example, in commercial datasets and other places about the efficacy of individual solutions. The challenge is understanding how they have been applied in the building stock and then how people are experiencing those measures if they have been installed, and if the experience of living and working within our buildings is changing over time because the conditions have changed. The missing assessment for us is being able to give you a sense of what has happened over the last five years and then being able to tell you what we therefore think might happen going forward. As you will know, there is quite good information out there on things like the efficacy of shutters or air-conditioning.

You almost need more post-occupancy assessment, a little like when we do the census. We could have a section on how is your home, as well as all the other things we ask.

In a nutshell, I suppose it is what the impacts are of these measures, or lack thereof, in buildings. We gave you the example of schools. The Department for Education has done that research, so we are beginning to understand what the impacts of overheating are on our schoolchildren’s ability to learn. What are the other impacts out there for people living in buildings? Is it getting worse? Are there measures that have worked? Are buildings performing as they were designed? Are buildings performing and meeting things like Part O of the building regulations in practice? That is the information we need.

That is lacking?

Yes, it is the survey information over time.

That makes perfect sense. On a slightly different point: what evidence did you find to assess whether the emergency services have sufficient plans and resilience measures in place to manage cascading risk triggered by extreme heat?

We look at cascading risk, and there is some good evidence. For example, there is good data in NHS trusts about instances of overheating or instances of flooding that have triggered a risk assessment, so we can see how many occurrences there have been, and whether those are becoming more frequent. That would include some frontline services. There is some data about cascading risk, but again it is an area where we have highlighted the need to look across those services. Again, I don’t want to foreshadow what we will say in our climate change risk assessment, but health is one of those areas. There is a gap in evidence and data, particularly outside the health service. That is something else we draw attention to. For first responder services in the community—GP practices and other public health services—we have no routinely collected data that covers adaptation in those settings in particular. And, given that the impacts of heat risk disproportionately affect the vulnerable population, we don’t have data on care homes, domiciliary care and so on. That is another area of concern, and I would argue that that is as important for understanding cascading risk as understanding emergency services within the NHS trusts.

That leads on really nicely to the question around health and wellbeing. The adverse weather and health plan has goals related to the prevention of mortality, morbidity and the increase in years of life lost due to these adverse weather events. Is it the CCC’s contention that these metrics reframed for other climate hazards should be the basis of a target for the NAP? If not, have you considered what the best metrics might be?

We have not taken a view on exactly what the right metrics should be. We obviously assess progress against that kind of data because it is what is available. Morbidity and mortality are pretty basic things, so they are obvious things to track. You could go about it in slightly different ways, and those would be questions for Government to decide rather than us, but the fact that there are those measures is helpful. The challenge is really that narrowing scope. We largely know what is happening in hospitals, but much less in care homes and GPs. The NHS is a large system; if you add social care to that you have an even larger system. We really need to understand that whole end-to-end system to understand what is really driving those risks and what we can do about it.

Similar metrics for those equal partners to have them on the same grid?

Yes. You may also want some simpler metrics. For example, how many care homes have the facility to keep people below 26 degrees—the critical temperature regardless of the outside—if it is 40 degrees outside, for example. We don’t have basic information about whether care homes can do that or not.

Are you saying there is not even a baseline, never mind that these are being monitored?

In many areas, no. I don’t want to say for everything, but we don’t know a lot of things that we would really want to know.

It seems like a key area for us is to close some gaps straightaway.

The other thing that we have picked up on in the adverse weather and health plan, which we might come on to, is that it is concerned with public health measures. The committee would like that plan expanded to broader climate change health risks, including vector-borne diseases, mental health—which is a question you have asked us—and so on, which I suppose is the depth of the evidence and the width of the things we are looking at.

That is our next question. How do they compare the data around mental health as opposed to physical? Do you feel that has already had some coverage?

There are no available indicators to monitor the impacts of climate change and mental health.

There was a whole definition of environmental anxiety. I thought there was a whole subcategory of anxiety.

Not in the adverse weather and health plan. The committee has advised that that needs to be improved. We will be offering advice which includes these broader climate risks in the Well-Adapted UK report. We talked about mental health in the progress report as well.

That is really helpful. You have pretty much covered the latter part. Could you just add a bit more to the process around developing objectives? We have here that the CCC had a request for agreed planning assumptions, including a minimum climate scenario and timeframe from DEFRA in August 2025. Is there anything you need to build on there?

No, other than to say that the committee has received the commission and will be responding to the Minister very shortly. We will give advice on the temperature objective and the timeframe within which the Government should work. As I said earlier, probably the maximum thing I can share at the moment is that the committee will describe in a bit more detail what further objectives could look like.

You touched upon the Well-Adapted UK element of this fourth climate change risk assessment. Is there anything else you want to flag in there that would touch upon this?

No. We have received the commission early enough and have really welcomed the working-level relationships with DEFRA which mean we will be able to consider that thinking on objectives and planning assumptions from the committee and then the advice that we offer in the climate change risk assessment and in the Well-Adapted UK report.

Do you have similar relationships with the Department of Health in the public health sphere?

Health is one of the Departments we would like to see, yes.

So, not yet, but you would like to?

We would like to.

So, a plan for the future. Thank you very much.

Emma Pinchbeck and Dr Richardson, thank you once again for coming along and giving us the benefit of your knowledge; there are a number of things from your evidence that we will be seriously considering. With that, we will bring this session to a close.