Welcome to this afternoon’s session of the Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee, where today we are holding the pre-appointment session to question the Government's preferred candidate for Chair of the Climate Change Committee, Nigel Topping. Nigel, you are welcome. We are also joined for today's session with their own questions by most of the members of the Environmental Audit Committee. Chair Toby Perkins, to my right, you are also very welcome. We look forward to an interesting discussion for the next, probably, hour and a half. We will try to make sure we conclude our deliberations by 4.30 pm, and I will start the questioning. So, Nigel Topping, you completed the lengthy questionnaire you were asked to complete. You put a lot of detail in there. You say your priorities include finding out what Parliament thinks the biggest challenge of net zero will be. You have been on the Climate Change Committee board for a number of years now. What do you currently think MPs see as the biggest challenges?

Well, what I meant in my answer to that question was I was keen to find out from the horse's mouth, so to speak, the breadth of opinion across elected Members. I have a transmitted understanding of what that is but not a direct view. I am very aware that there is a breadth of views on ambition, non-feasibility and costs and benefits, and I am keen that the full analytical heft of the Climate Change Committee members and secretariat are at the service of the decision-making process that you represent, so that you get the best rigorous evidence-based advice across some of these quite complex issues.

Yes. I will just ask you again, though, what is your sense of where MPs’ priorities lie?

My sense is that there is an acute focus on the issues of cost of living and how the transition to the legal target of net zero impacts that. We have some quite clear figures of what we think the impact will be particularly around domestic heating and car travel in the advice for the seventh carbon budget. Also, macroeconomically, what is the impact on the overall economy, the impact on growth, the impact on borrowing? I think the key figure in the latest advice is that the net cost that we see is going down considerably and is now at about 0.2% of GDP per year. There is the domestic concern: can individual families afford the transition, and when will they see the benefit that is promised? Then macroeconomic concerns: what are the overall costs and what is the pattern of borrowing and spending? I am happy to go into more detail on both of those.

Yes. In the role as chair, you have a lot of political engagement to do. I think everybody who is here at the moment will recognise there being a move away from the political consensus that we had for many years. How will you manage the change in the political situation and that loss of consensus?

First, I think that one of the most important aspects of the role is to try to maintain that evidence-based narrative around the transition. For me, there are key ways of addressing that move away from a strong consensus. I do not know how much that consensus has fractured. I do see that in my work over the last years, historically that consensus has been seen as a real strength of this country, and that consistency of policy signals has been seen as a real strength of the business and investor community, so my way to answer that would be to focus on providing the evidence that this transition is feasible and beneficial economically at the macro level and at the household level.

If the consensus were a source of great strength, the loss of consensus is, therefore, a source of great weakness, would you say?

It is a potential weakness in terms of the country's ability to attract the investment needed for the industries of the future or lose out competitively to other countries. It depends on whether the change in consensus starts to impact the consistency of policy from Government to Government. That is a potential weakness, yes.

Yes. So, do you think your role includes trying to rebuild consensus?

I think the role of the Committee is to provide the evidence and, where there are contentious points with different views, to provide the rigorous evidence base to allow that consensus. Although the differences of opinion are to be resolved through the normal debating process. I don’t think it is our role or our ability to stamp consensus on the politics of the House, but I do think it is our job to provide the evidence to help even your discussions.

Yes. Thank you for those answers. Now, there has been some media commentary on your air travel. Your Committee in its February 2025 advice to the Government was that Ministers consider a new frequent flyer levy. Yet your own air travel in the last year was 11 times more than the average Briton. Do you think the Chair of the CCC should be modelling good behaviour?

Well, flying is part of our economy. It has real benefits in terms of people's ability to go on holiday, but also the ability to do business and politics internationally. I have been an international climate diplomat in one form or another for some time. I was invited, for example by the Brazilian champion for COP30 to go to visit Belém. That is the kind of relationship building and advice that is difficult to do remotely. I think that the—

Do you not think you can do that by video conference?

I do a lot of video conferencing, but you cannot do everything by video conference. You cannot, for example, visit the physical site where the COP is going to be to form an opinion of how effective that is going to be—especially when there is contention around whether the physical preparation will be adequate and that is leading to uncertainty about the multilateral process.

Sure. I suppose my question is about showing leadership in your role. Do you have plans to look at your carbon footprint and the example it sets for other people?

I don’t anticipate flying much at all in the role as Chair of the Climate Change Committee. There may be a need to fly to Brazil in that role. Of course, it is a domestically focused role, and I am very conscious of the flying that I do do. I do it only when I really think it is necessary and very, very rarely for personal use.

Okay. Thank you. Mike Reader has a brief question.

Do you choose to offset when you fly?

Yes.

Okay. Thanks very much. What do you think is likely to keep you up at night in the new role?

What is most likely to keep me up at night in the new role is where there appears to be a growing division of opinion on a crucial matter that does not seem to be based in solid evidence, which I see as the prime role of the Committee. Q11            Chair: What is the top example of that?

I would say a good example would be the easy conflation of our uncompetitive electricity prices with our commitment to net zero. It is easy to say that those two are facts and, therefore, one causes the other when it is not in fact true. The high electricity prices are caused largely by the fact that our electricity prices are based on the marginal cost of gas, so it is a volatility tail wagging the net zero dog. That would be a good example. That is why for the last two years the Committee’s number one recommendation in our progress reports has been to address that missed alignment between electricity pricing and gas pricing, particularly as it pertains to the investment case for heat.

Yes. My colleagues will probably explore that in more detail, but I will ask one more follow-up on it now. What is the way of getting across the truth about this and ensuring people are convinced on it?

I think, first, by listening to the concerns. There is a real concern around uncompetitively expensive electricity prices. That seems to me something that binds us together that is not contentious. Then it is a question of getting into the detail, which is complex, and explaining that the majority of the time—I think over 95% of the time—our wholesale electricity prices are set by the price of gas. Explaining that, for example, other third-party analysts, like Bloomberg and Energy Finance, in their projections show UK wholesale prices halving in the next 10 years as a result of our move to lower-cost renewables. Getting under the detail of what some of the policy costs are, why they have been put on and why they have been put on electricity in some cases and not on gas for domestic heating in others. I don’t think there is any way of avoiding the complexity and getting into some of the detail.

Thank you very much. Barry Gardiner.

Thank you, Chair. First of all, can I thank you for the role that you performed at the Glasgow COP as our high-level champion there?. I think it was widely seen as successful. You have had the, I suppose, privilege of seeing at close hand two different styles of chairing the Committee on Climate Change with Lord Deben and with Professor Piers Forster as the interim Chair. How would you compare and contrast them in terms of their delivery and how would you see yourself benchmarked against them in terms of how you see the role and how you want to drive forward climate action?

Yes, two very different styles. Obviously, Lord Deben is an accomplished and seasoned lawmaker and understands the process of legislation and lawmaking inside out. I will not be able to replicate that from day one, although that is something I need to learn more about, that process. Piers is more from atmospheric science and personal experience as a farmer. In both cases they have been collegiate in ensuring that the talented members of the Committee are able to bring their rich expertise. Of course, I expect to continue that. In both cases they play to their strengths. One is a former MP and Minister, and the other is an academic. I would expect to play to my strength of experience in industry and working with industrial leaders and financiers as a relative strength but, again, maintaining that kind of collegiate and respectful atmosphere, which draws on the deep expertise of the Committee members.

The Secretary of State has recently announced that we are committed to even more ambitious targets in our NDCs, and I think what we need is confidence, which the CCC is there to give us through good science about our capacity to achieve them. Are you confident that we can achieve them? If I use “the Chair” as phraseology, what elements of it would keep you up at night worrying about how we might deliver on them and how are you going to drive that forward?

Yes, I am confident that it is achievable. Although we have consistently said it is ambitious but feasible, that does not mean it is a slam dunk. We draw on much more than just on the science. The science tells us a lot about how bad the problem is, and it is particularly relevant for adaptation, but of course it is much more engineering, economics and engaging with stakeholders across the full spectrum, from farmers to unions to different sectors of business. What gives me confidence is that it is a very rigorous process, and it is based on evidence and engagement across the spectrum of stakeholders. What also gives me confidence is that we have this strong evidence of something which is well understood in the economics of technology transitions, but is sometimes forgotten, which is this evidence of a learning effect. We have seen significant cost reductions in solar, wind, and in batteries and, therefore, in electric vehicles. We are starting to see that in some of the other technologies, which are earlier on in their deployment. That is confidence in our societal ability to innovate when we put our mind to something. That is relevant at a country level. It is also relevant an international level. It is a choice of how much we play nationally relative to internationally. To follow that framing, what keeps me up at night is the risk of losing momentum in an area where we have good momentum because for some reason we lose confidence. This is an issue for the UK. It is also broadly an issue for the west, when we look at just how fast China, and now India and other countries, are accelerating their own technology development with massive home deployment to drive down costs but then an international competitive advantage. We know there is a role for green hydrogen. The cost reductions in green hydrogen have not come as fast as we had thought five years ago. They have come faster in electrical, electrothermal, heating and industry, which is one of the reasons we are now more confident that that will be the technology in industry. But if we lose confidence just at the point when we have done the early investment, and we have drawn on our fantastic universities and engineering and R&D capability; if we lose our bottle just at the point when we have the chance to build the supply chains, which are internationally competitive, we don’t just miss out on our carbon budget targets, but we also miss out on the economic benefits to the economy as a whole, to job creation, and to households.

Well, is that simply a matter of bottle, as you put it—the confidence, the courage—or is it actually a question of ensuring that we provide adequate resources, both skills and financial, in order to make sure that we get those technologies to that stage?

Bottling would be a gross oversimplification. It is of course about not providing all those enabling conditions and not adjusting them as the technologies mature. We can waste the money by continuing to support a technology as the cost comes down. That is just as unhelpful as not supporting it when it needs support, and so not creating that. With electric vehicles, for example, if we can reach price parity, which we expect in the next couple of years, that will be great, but we all know that if the charging infrastructure isn’t there, people will say, “Great. Thanks for the nice car, but I can’t charge it, so I am not going to buy it”. Similarly with heat pumps, we can address the economics of it, but it doesn’t help if we don’t have the skills in place. With all these transitions it is never just about the technology; it is about getting the right policy signalling, the right support at the right time, and across the whole value chain.

I suppose what I am asking you in terms of your leadership role with the Climate Change Committee is: what do you see as your role in driving that? Because it is a mix. It is financial. It is skills. It is getting those technologies ready, ripe and in play. Let me go back to the first question. How do you see Lord Deben having done that? How do you see Piers Forster having done that? What are the ways in which they have tried to make sure that that happens, that you would wish to emulate or do you have your own path that you would wish to pursue?

Yes. I would see evolution rather than revolution. I only overlapped with Lord Deben very briefly but obviously I was aware of his work from afar for some time. They have both maintained that strong tradition of the Climate Change Committee being rigorously evidence based. There is no room to move away from that. I think that what I have brought in the last couple of years that I have been on the Committee is a real focus on what is our evidence about the direction of technology. The two things that I would probably double down on, if I were to be appointed, would be, first, really making sure that we are consistently kicking the tyres on what our assumptions are about the direction of technology. Especially early on in the technology, the uncertainties are much higher, so you have to adapt more often. And then I think more engagement with the financial sector. This is a great strength of this country. I have engaged quite a lot with the finance sector in other roles. We have an opportunity to gain an oversized share of the financing of the transition internationally. One thing I have noticed in climate negotiations is that the private finance sector often just materialises as a chequebook, “The private sector must do this”, or “They must pay that”. It is much more helpful to think of private finance as a whole set of very different actors, from asset owners to asset managers to banks to insurers to regulators, who will bring problem solving skills to unlocking the capital. As I have seen, particularly in my role as a non-executive director at the National Wealth Fund, this intersection between policy, smartly deployed public finance and mobilised private finance does require real problem-solving skills and no one actor is smart enough to solve that problem without bringing those voices in, so I think it may be helpful to bring in some more voices from the private finance sector.

I suspect you are familiar with the Committee’s 2025 progress report. Could you walk us through your thoughts on the Government’s response to that report, please?

As you know the report showed some improvement from the previous years. I think that 61% of the policy areas are covered by “adequate” or “some risk”. We don’t expect to get to the point where there is no risk, as we recognise transition is not something that you can plan perfectly. So there has been some improvement and, of course, the report information gathering closed on 23 May. As we said in the report, we were aware that there were several areas with policy to come. I think in the last five days we have seen the industrial strategy, which again on a first assessment does go some way towards addressing our point on electricity pricing for industry. We are seeing the additional support for the electric vehicle transition recently, again bolstering that. We are pleased with the progress that we have seen, but still 39% is not as strong as we would like to see, so there is lots of room for improvement. We have now seen some improvement in some areas and there are other areas where we had hoped to see improvement before we get to the report next year. Of course, the carbon budget delivery plan will be the key document. That lays out the full response.

In your role as chair, how would you see yourself and the Committee scrutinising Government and holding their feet to the fire to deliver the expectations?

This is one of the most important roles of the Committee, not just to provide advice but to be the critical friend. I would expect us to continue to be a critical friend. If we don’t see movement on the spread of electricity and gas prices, which has been our number one recommendation for the last two years, we will continue to call that out as a growing risk in terms of the transition to heat pumps. Similarly, in our adaptation reports we are very strong about the fact that we are not adequately prepared from an adaptation point of view. We just have to keep being rigorous there about saying, “Okay, the policy has moved and that changes our assessment”, or “The policy has not moved, or it has gone backwards, or it has moved in another way”, so sticking to our guns in terms of being rigorous about assessing what the evidence is.

Would it be fair to say that you are expecting to continue to scrutinise the Government in the way that it has been done in past years, but you just continue to make the points? If there is something that the Government are not delivering, is there something that the Committee and you as chair could do differently to encourage the Government to make more progress?

Broadly, I would expect us to continue to scrutinise in the way we have done across multiple Governments. Our job is not to make policy. We are conscious of that. I will work hard to make sure we are providing robust advice that may be pointing to options without trying to be prescriptive. Of course, the Government can ask us for deeper advice on particular issues if they want and we are always happy to do that.

Yes. What kind of access to the Net Zero Mission Board would you expect to have, and how would you expect to work with that board to influence progress?

I would expect to have easy access to that board.

Do you think that that will just happen, or what do you need to do to make sure that you can influence that?

I cannot see any reason that it would not happen, but of course I will have to ask for it. Again, as I say, the access to the opinions of elected Members, but also to the decision-making machinery will be important, yes.

Yes. The central point of my questioning is to get to the heart of how vocal you might be as a new chair in holding the Government to account. As an overarching comment, how vocal would you expect to be? How interventionist would you expect to be in holding the Government to account?

I don’t see the role of the chair to be interventionist.

Fine.

However, I do see the role as to be clear, and perhaps where advice has been given consistently for multiple years and ignored then to be more vocal. We understand that this is a complex transition and policy making is a complex process. It is more complex than giving advice, because the buck stops there. We don’t expect instantaneous responses to new advice that we give. We expect there to be a maturation process, but I think in particular, where we have given advice over multiple years and it has not been followed, you can expect me to be very forthright.

Thank you very much. I know a number of colleagues have questions that have come to mind as a result of some of what you have said. I am going to ask them just to hold on to those questions for when they are due to come, because we have a lot to get through. We may well come back to what you have just said. We will move on to Pippa Heylings, please.

In your role as high-level champion, as you have said, you brought a wealth of experience in terms of industry, business, investors in the financial sector, but I want to explore how you see that you can bring that in terms of your relationship with the Government. As you said, you would lean into your experience and skills. Since the election, there have been a lot of governmental changes, so who do you think will be your key contacts in Government, and how would you be approaching that relationship?

I think it will be senior officials and, from time to time, Ministers and Secretaries of State in the relevant Department. It is worth reminding ourselves that we end up talking an awful lot about the power transition, but if you look at our latest report emissions from electricity are sixth in the league table, so although there is an awful lot of work to be done and the 2030 emissions measure is essential for our overall, continued achievement of carbon budgets, there is more to it than that. Surface transport is the No. 1 emitter at the moment and the one with the most work to be done in the next couple of budgets, so engaging with the team responsible for the policy around there would be important. I would like to reiterate that it will be important for me to engage with the machinery of government, but also the broader views of parliamentarians through appropriate channels, especially where there are areas of contention that we might be able to help address with robust advice. Q24            Pippa Heylings: Let us dig into that a little bit. If it were other Departments, how do you think you would go about having those meetings? I agree that our concern is principally around power and the decarbonisation of the energy to the detriment perhaps of some of these other key sectors as well. What have you seen up until now that you would continue with, or you would change, in terms of getting access to those other Ministers in other Departments?

As a member of the Committee I have not had much access. It tends to be done primarily through the chair. But I am pretty straightforward. It would be like: how is our advice landing in the Department? Is there anything that we are saying that is, in particular, factually contested? Again, if we don’t agree on the facts and it is very hard to agree on what to do about the facts, so I would always be keen to, first, understand what in our analysis and our advice differs from the way that Departments see the future in their domain, and then to understand how our recommendations land. Again, in particular we need to understand why things that we have been advising for some time have not moved, and how things that may be new bits of advice land, so it is about understanding that relationship. Our job is to provide advice but, as I said in my written response, if that is ultimately not acted on it may be because we are not providing advice in a way that is helpful. It is not our job to make policy. Our job is to provide advice in a helpful way. So it is about understanding, first of all, factually, do we have areas of disagreement? Quite often we use exactly the same models to try to make sure that we are not deviating, for example, in our assumption of baselines but not doing exactly the same work. And then it is about understanding the way that our recommendations, particularly in the progress reports, are landing.

As we have just heard, the Government have put forward the Net Zero Mission Board, which in essence surely should be bringing together in a way a mechanism, in the same way you have that cross-ministerial, cross-departmental look. It seems, though, that you would like some separate sessions as well. How do you see that mission board fulfilling that role?

The mission board is really important, but I think if we are to do our job properly we should not assume that there is any one lever that is going to deliver everything.

Would you see yourself as chair being on that board as well—would that be useful time?

I don’t know. I will have to think about that. As I say, I would want to make sure I am spending my time where it is most needed, and if momentum is good and it is not an area that is showing lots of reds in our progress report, maybe not. I don’t know yet where that would be best employed.

You may start exploring that, first of all, to see which of the Departments it is bringing in to it within the board.

Yes, because I have not had enough time to build deep relationships with every Department. There needs to be a certain amount of triage as to where it is going to be most important. Q28            Pippa Heylings: When you say that you would also reach beyond parliamentarians, how do you think that you might do that? Have you seen any good examples of how that is done?

No, I don’t know. I would seek advice from previous chairs and officials. I would imagine as a starting point the official spokespeople from the various parties to understand their points of view on particular issues.

Thank you. You appear to share our puzzlement over exactly what goes on on the mission board. We have been trying to find out exactly what happens. Do you think that there should be more transparency in its work publishing agendas and minutes, for example?

I see no reason why the Mission Board should not be very transparent, and I would dearly like to sit in on a couple of meetings and make an informed opinion about it.

That sounds like you have had a think about the answer to Pippa Heylings’ question, and you might want to go on the board.

Attending one or two meetings is not the same as becoming a member, which then becomes an ongoing time commitment so I would distinguish those two.

Yes. If you are successful, we may well come back to that.

Okay.

I am just trying to piece together the responses to Blake and Pippa’s questions. Blake was asking about challenging the Government and you were clear that you were going to, but in response to Pippa you said you were more of an adviser than getting stuck in with Departments. Where do you see your role? Are you there to challenge and make sure the Government are doing the right thing or are you there to write reports, to give advice and do diplomacy on a softer scale? Where do you see the balance of your role?

Our role by statute is to be the provider of advice on carbon budgets and then on progress reports on—

That is the Committee. What about your role? What are you going to be doing?

I think my role is to keep the strength of that rigorous process going. As I say, I think that means providing good advice and then where it is not followed or deviated from to point that out, and where that is consistent to point that out more vocally. That is why you will hear me talk about the spark spread between electricity and gas until something is done about it, because at the moment we will not make the transition to heat pumps in domestic buildings unless that is addressed, and the savings that are available to householders will not be met unless that is addressed. If that is addressed, why be strident about something that has been addressed? It depends on what is being followed and what is not being followed.

Could you give us an example from your career where you have challenged the Government or a major funder on the narrative and how you went about that?

What I have consistently done across roles in the not-for-profit space—bringing the voice of business to the Paris agreement and as the UN climate champion—is to advise leaders of all stripes not to focus entirely on the problem. You all know, because you live by it, that the media has a mantra that if it bleeds it leads. There is a desire to always talk about how bad things are, and there are lots of bad things to talk about in terms of climate change, in terms of the impact already done. The key thing is to point to where we already have momentum that we can build on. In terms of building support across the public, across industry, across finance, pointing to momentum, direction of travel and opportunity and innovation is advice that I have consistently given to people who want to frame this as such a hard problem.

So, in answer to my question, the example there is you as a delegate in Paris, did you say?

No, not as a delegate.

I recognise what you may do in the future, but can you give us examples of what you have done?

The example was as a CEO of We Mean Business, a coalition of NGOs working with business in the run up to the Paris COP, bringing that narrative of opportunity in a world where most NGOs were talking about a narrative of failure and it being very difficult to surmount problems, and the media likewise. I may think of a more recent example. Yes, right now, as I say, in some of my international work I have been working to support the incoming Brazilian presidency of COP30 in Belém and, similarly, I have been advising them to talk about the way that they are building on the momentum of others and making this about the opportunity for the private sector, not primarily about the negotiations process. That has been the typical approach of the Foreign Ministry in Brazil to focus on the negotiation process, and we have had some success in encouraging them to move away from that.

I will come to my question. Talk me through your 100-day plan, the first 100 days of your appointment. What are the key things you will be focusing on? What are you going to deliver in that first three months?

Two key things, one is figuring out the best way to engage with the Government and Parliament.

Shouldn’t you know that by now, given your experience and the roles you have had?

No, I don’t think so. I have not had a statutory role to engage with multiple Departments until now. I have some ideas, but I am not aware of the exact mechanics of that, so I need to sort that out and not just start turning up unannounced. That is a mechanical issue, but I do need to figure out who are the right people to speak to in the different political parties and who are the right officials to speak to in different Departments. The other thing is that we have just completed this heavy period of analysis of CB7 and then the progress report. In the five-year cycle there is a little bit more space now. By September I would like to have our work programme established for the next couple of years and look at the areas where we might want to go deeper, given some of the areas of more uncertainty or more contention in the current advice.

Do you think it is clear in the Government who owns the net zero strategy?

Yes.

Who do you think owns it?

I think it is the Secretary of State for DESNZ.

Why do you think that is?

I think it is in the name of the Department.

We talked before about how the seventh carbon budget covers DFT and MHCLG. Is it the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero who owns it or actually is this not owned higher up given the importance?

Yes. It is owned across multiple Departments, but I guess your question is about where does the buck stop for the whole plan, right? I guess that ultimately it is the Prime Minister.

Thank you. In your opinion, should the Committee be highlighting gaps that exist in Government delivery, particularly between Departments?

Yes, it is absolutely our job to highlight gaps in delivery. One area that I would like to explore—and you allude to that somewhat—is it is not always the case that everything is delivered in these nice and neat silos. That extends not just across Departments but also some of the other bodies involved in setting norms and standards. My experience is that the National Wealth Fund has an important role, for example, if you think about the advice of the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the rules of Treasury. There are all sorts of other things that influence the machinery of policy making, and especially where we see something that we have advised is not moving, rather than just assume it is a failure of one silo, to try to understand whether there is some interconnection between a regulator or a finance partner—

My last question, what is your approach going to be to deal with the quite strong lobbying you are going to get, particularly from vested organisations? We experience it on the Committee, and I imagine you are going to experience it to an even greater extent from right across the spectrum in the net zero world.

I am quite confident in my own ability to assess the information. I come from the business world, and I have been working with business and investors for a long time to try to figure out how to unlock capital and markets to deliver climate decisions for a long time, so I have probably heard most of the attempts to obfuscate or divert and so I am not worried about being lobbied. I will give it pretty short shrift.

Just going to go back to the question about cross-departmental work, do you think this is improving given that this Government have a mission-oriented approach?

I do think that a mission-oriented approach is helpful because it—

Has it made any difference? Have things got better?

Again I pointed to our recent progress report, which is that the early evidence is that, yes, it is making a difference, but it is early evidence. We are one year in.

Just give us an example.

Again, it goes to the point that it is not just about power. There is confirmation on the mandate position on EVs and then the recent addition of a small grant, particularly focused at the cheaper end, which is where the price parity is more important. That is one small example I would say.

Yes, very current. Thank you. Toby Perkins.

Thank you very much, Chair. The Climate Change Committee said in the June 2025 progress report on the subject of aviation that the Government should help manage growth in aviation demand in line with net zero. You spoke about the fact that the low-carbon technologies were all at an early stage. We had the Aviation Minister in at the Environmental Audit Committee this morning. It may be good news for you, but he was pretty robust about the fact that he has no desire to reduce demand in terms of the amount of flying that we do. Indeed, he did not see demand management as a necessary tool in the Government achieving aviation expansion without breaching our environmental commitments. Are you concerned about the Government not using demand management as a tool within that and what steps will they have to take in order to deliver airport expansion without pushing net zero further away, without policies that will deal with demand management?

As you said, we do think that demand is material and, unmanaged, we see it rising by up to 45%, and that starts to make achieving our carbon budget very difficult. As I said earlier, aviation now represents more emissions than the power sector. It is still something that has not sunk in for a lot of people. A 45% increase in that would mean that the power sector emissions keep going down. That would not make it easy for the country to reach its legally binding figures. This is one of the areas where I think one of the innovations of the Committee’s work with the citizens panel has been really informative. We have found that citizens tell us that they get the polluter pays idea. They understand that flying is one of the causes of climate change and that those who pollute should pay the price. They also have this strong kind of fairness idea that we do not want to price out the ordinary family from the most common holiday destination of Spain. This is one of those areas I talked about earlier where the uncertainty of the technology is very high, because it is relatively early days and most of the progress on sustainable aviation fuels is one technology pathway—which I am sure you have discussed—which is limited by bio feedstocks, so it is the second and third generation technologies that will get us much further. We are pretty much in a balanced pathway. We do not assume heroics on technologies that have not been proven yet. We assume that the mandated 10% is achieved, but we only get to 17%, I think, SAF by 2040. That could be much, much higher if the international process of the ICAO commitment and of course starts creating the signals internationally to accelerate innovation but it is nuanced. We are also trying to be more nuanced in our thinking about airport expansion, recognising that it is not a zero-sum game. There may be unintended consequences, and what we do here may not reduce emissions in the whole system if we just displace emissions somewhere else. What we do here could just put prices up with output without motivating innovation in sustainable aviation fuel. It is a difficult one for the Government to navigate but, at the moment, with our current vision of the trajectory of technologies we think that demand management is important because, unchecked, we forecast a significant rise in demand. We are not saying that we need to fly less, but that we need to check the otherwise accelerated increase in flying, and we need to keep a close eye on this balance between demand and technology.

In terms of the approach that you would take to your role if you were providing this advice to Government, and you heard the Government Aviation Minister saying, “Well, actually, we don’t believe demand management should be part of our plan”, what would you say to him?

I would like to understand how he thinks we stay within our legal limits without that. I would also like to understand what he or she is thinking about in terms of the tools of demand management and bring some of the insights that we have had from the citizens panel. I would also want to know how closely we are tracking in promoting different technologies, and how we are collaborating internationally. For example, again to take an example from the National Wealth Fund, the public purse is invested in a company called ZeroAvia, which is a hydrogen fuel cell aviation solution that is very appropriate for short haul, so any island hopping. It is about understanding in the round where we see the demand in technology pathways, because it is the multiple of the two that gets us to net zero or not.

How well do you think we are performing in Britain in terms of decarbonising domestic buildings?

Very poorly. We are way behind our competitors. We are at about 1% in heat pump penetration, which is insane when you remember that heat pumps are three or four times as efficient, so 300% to 400% of the efficiency of gas boilers. This is what is behind our now repeated advice. We will keep repeating that we have to address the so-called spark gap between the cost of electricity, the price of electricity and the price of gas. A whole series of policy decisions have been made that load that in a way which does not make achieving that benefit make sense, as a country or as a household. If that moves from 4:1 to between 2:1 and 3:1, markets will also start innovating and the need for good fiscal stimulus from the Government will reduce as markets see that there is a profit to be made that can be shared between the implementers and households.

What about the embodied carbon within the construction of homes? I read evidence that said 50% of the carbon attached to a new home in the first 25 years would have been in its construction. Do you think we take embodied carbon seriously enough and, if not, what should we be doing?

Obviously, cement is a big part of that—a global industry that does not travel well because it is relatively low cost, and there is the cost of transport. This is the sort of area where we would have the opportunity to drive innovation, which could create international competitiveness. If we don’t someone else will and then we will end up importing all the technology. It is about the embodied energy of materials, so steel, cement, and glass, and these are often linked to industrial heat.

In terms of the cancellation of the public sector decarbonisation scheme, what signal did you think that sent? Was it a good decision?

No. You will see one of our strongest recommendations is to focus on decarbonising public buildings and, again, we think that is important because it is something where there is often an agency problem with individually owned buildings. It is hard to bring about the systemic shift because you rely on millions of individuals making decisions, but the public estate does not have that challenge as in effect there is one agent. There is a chance again to pump prime all the supply chains in this country. It would not have to be just focusing on committing to decarbonising those buildings. There be other public procurement levers that could be used to support that, and the combination of decarbonising the estate and public procurement signals would be exactly the kind of thing that can accelerate innovation and build strong supply chains locally.

Finally, the DESNZ Committee made a recommendation around the need for a one-stop shop on retrofit advice. Is that a recommendation that you would support?

I don’t know about a one-stop shop for retrofit advice. The devil is in the detail. What I do know is that around the world it is a struggle to figure out how to get individual householders to decarbonise their buildings. There have been various attempts with green mortgages that have not worked. Again, it is often an agency problem. We have made progress recently with the National Wealth Fund and some big use of public guarantees in social housing where there is one owner of hundreds or thousands of houses. What is needed is to look at the consumer journey: what is the thought process? What is the information? A one-stop shop might be the answer, but the devil is in the detail of who designs the one-stop shop and how thoughtfully it engages with the actual way that people make decisions. It is an appealing idea, but the idea alone will not solve the problem. It will have to be implemented in a very thoughtful way.

Thank you. The recommendation to the Government on this is that we are awaiting their response to our report. We are expecting them to come up with some detail, which will hopefully give you something to comment on.

Do you have any concerns about the readiness of the grid network to cope with and accommodate the energy transitions?

Yes. We know that the grid needs a serious upgrade. We will be using more and more electricity as we electrify some of the technologies that to date have been burning fossil fuels. This goes a little bit to some of the conversations earlier about managing the transition in lockstep. Nothing works on its own. I think you can make the case that, pretty much worldwide, we have underestimated our own ability to innovate and get the cost down and, therefore, drive up the deployment of renewables. This issue of grid readiness is an issue everywhere. We are in pretty good shape having thought about it and made some of the institutional changes, but again it needs to be executed. This is an example not of bottling out but maybe just running out of room in terms of the ability to actually execute. I think some of the changes to planning focus on major infrastructure. Giving a different route and not having an entirely first in, first out connection system are good moves, but that is something that is going to require real attention over the next decade to make the strengthening that allows us both to increase the amount of power and move it around in a different way, for example, from areas of high production, like in the North sea, to demand centres in the south, and so that is strengthening. Mobilising the finance is going to be absolutely key, so it is something to keep a really close eye on, yes.

Clearly this is an expensive undertaking, and we are talking tens of billions of pounds over time. Do you think it is right that the cost of that is borne by consumers?

We estimate in the seventh carbon budget advice that the net cost to the economy is about 0.2% of GDP per year, on average £26 billion of investment and £22 billion of saving. We also estimate that 65% to 90% of that investment will come from the private sector. So, the extent to which costs are borne by the consumer varies from sector to sector. We estimate that the average household will save £700 a year on energy and £700 a year on transport by 2050 as a result, following the balanced pathway. It is also important always to think about what the counterfactual is. A couple of years ago the OBR looked at what the impact on public borrowing would be of a once-in-a-decade spike in the price of gas. It concluded that that would cost us 13% of GDP between now and 2050. Well, the once-in-a-decade spike in gas price which we are still experiencing now is much worse than the one that it modelled. So, it is fair to say that the counterfactual is continuing reliance on expensive, volatile fossil fuels, which will be much more than the cost of the transition, so that is the basic economics as the OBR sees it.

Transmission costs in Britain being higher than comparative economies, such as France and Germany, do you think there is a good or compelling reason for that?

As I was saying earlier about the electricity prices, we really have to break it down into all the different elements. These are ultimately policy decisions about competitiveness and where we want costs to fall in the economy. Our advice is based on what is needed to get their investment going to drive up the uptake of heat pumps. We point to the opportunity to remove some of the policy costs, which it has been decided will be put on electricity and which, for example, have not been put on like a carbon price is put on electricity when it is made by gas, but it is not put on gas when it is used for heating, so there is not a level playing field. Ultimately, there are policy choices about how we want to drive the transition but also how we want to drive household costs. Electricity is about 3.1% of the basket of goods, so reduction would have a deflationary effect and possibly an effect on the cost of borrowing. It is not just the transmission costs; it is also some of the legacy policy costs and those are the ones, in particular, where we think there is an opportunity to reduce.

Just to continue that question a little bit, we have figures from UK Steel used to report on the cost of energy to industry in the UK. £50 per megawatt-hour out of the £65 or nearly £66 per megawatt-hour in the last year comes from transmission costs. Instead of it being £50, in France it is £35 and in Germany it is below £30. Why are our transmission costs so much higher?

I don’t think that our transmission costs are necessarily higher. It is the way that we have constructed the prices. I was just reading about Salzgitter in Germany, and the German Government have just decided to strategically reduce electricity prices. It is important that the devil is in the detail, and this may well be something that would be useful for the Committee to spend more time on in this next period, where we have this hiatus between budgets, to make sure that we can present the evidence of how these cost stacks are built up and what is a cost and what is a policy decision. The policy decisions to put something up—a policy cost on gas or electricity or onto the Exchequer—are complex ones.

You are adding that into the work programme you were talking about earlier?

Yes.

I have questions on jobs and skills, but I want to ask you about who will be the public face of the Committee. Is it you or is it the chief executive? How do you see that being divided? I am conscious that I don’t think in the presentation documents we mentioned the chief executive and how you will work.

Obviously the chief executive leads the team and the day-to-day work, and we are blessed that the chief executive is a very good communicator. I would expect both the chief executive and me to speak in public on the work of the Committee and to decide case by case who will be most effective in getting the message across to the audience.

I think most of the previous incarnations of the Committee have had a serving or previous politician; most of them have sat in the House of Lords at some point. Do you think the Committee has the necessary political skills and background experience to navigate what is probably a more testing time, given the previous discussion about consensus? Will you be reviewing the membership of the Committee as to whether you have that necessary experience?

I don’t think Adair Turner was a Lord when he was chair.

He was.

Was he? Okay. Then this is a departure. That was the point I made in my response about the thing I would need to learn most about. I will have to make a judgment on whether it is something that I can learn quickly enough or whether I need to strengthen the Committee. I would welcome opinions on that. It is something that I am aware of. As you say, in a less consensual time it is perhaps even more important.

How do you compare your strengths with those of your main predecessor, not the interim—Lord Deben? Do you think you bring different things to the table?

Obviously, Lord Deben brought deep political and ministerial experience, and I won’t be able to replicate that without cramming in another lifetime. In that sense, I am more similar to Adair in bringing deep analytical strengths and a bit more experience of the private sector.

Mr Topping, can I ask you to speak up a bit? I know you are turning to face Mr Murphy, but I think one or two people are struggling to hear.

Yes, of course.

I will ask all members of the Committee to speak up a bit as well.

Does this work?

Yes. You are fine when you are facing down. It is just because you are facing the other way a bit.

Inevitably I will have a different style and different strengths from Lord Turner and from Lord Deben. We don’t have a full Committee. We have the opportunity to add a couple of members within the statutory limit, and I think now would be a good time to think about that balance of skills. I said about the first 100 days, and one thing I am very familiar with from normal commercial boards is to do a full board effectiveness review. I know this is not a board in that sense but one of the things I will aim to do in the first few months is an effectiveness review that looks at the issues about the balance of skills on the Committee, considering the workload we have in the next five years.

On jobs and skills more broadly for the transition, are you concerned about the progress in meeting our net zero targets and the way in which they might be hindered by the lack of necessary skills that are required across the range of sectors?

I tend to have quite an optimistic view of the way that markets will respond to produce the skills that are needed for the transition, given the right signals of consistency, ambition and the right incentives. One of our recommendations is that it would be useful for the Government to undertake a full skills audit. It is particularly important where you have long lead time skills. One of the blessings of the transition is that there is a reskillable workforce. If we look at all the skills in the North sea, a lot of those are very transferable to offshore wind. The skills of heating engineers are very transferable from gas boilers to heat pumps. It is not a four-year training programme, so we have that advantage that often the market will be able to respond quite quickly, but nevertheless having a consistent trajectory will make it easier for the market and the training bodies to respond. We do look at and consider whether availability of skills might be a constraint beyond the competence of the technology.

Do you think the Government are sufficiently seized of the problem with the skills agenda for the transition? Is it as high a priority as it should be?

We will see how they respond with their plans and then we will judge that. We think at the moment the plans are not clear enough, so when the plans come out we will be able to judge those.

What role do you think there is for the Committee in thinking about things like a just transition? One of the big topics is obviously thinking about how you support workers in carbon-intensive industries that are declining because of the transition or that are in natural decline anyway. Do you see shaping that as outside your remit, as a kind of social economic task, or is that something that the Committee will be considering?

It is a good question. We very much consider it in our remit, which is why we have engaged with unions and local government and all the different stakeholder groups. We have been quite clear that we think that Port Talbot was not managed well. The key thing about just transition is planning, and what you need for planning is clarity about where we are going. We know where we are going, so there are no real excuses for not having a good dialogue and thoughtful plans where we know an industry is in decline and others are coming up. That dialogue must be with the workforce, local government, the finance industry, and policymakers. We could, if asked, do more work on just transition and pointing out particular regional clusters where we think there needs to be work done. It is something we take into consideration and think is important, but again the key is planning and dialogue. Having a consistent direction of travel, which is what the process we have in this country gives us, creates the perfect conditions for just transition processes to be implemented but they still need to be implemented. They don’t happen by magic.

You see trade unions and local government as key stakeholders to engage with in that?

Yes, absolutely.

This is my final question, very quickly returning to the politics and navigating the political landscape. Before the last election one of the political parties wrote to journalists about some of the CCC’s recommendations, asking another political party to respond to all of those and whether they did or did not agree with them, would they put them forward. That was seen at the time as a politicisation of the CCC. How will you navigate what is likely to be a more politicised environment in the next five to 10 years? I know we have covered this, but it is a more political environment, an issue that is more politicised, the consensus has changed. Returning to the question, will you be thinking hard about the political experience on the Committee to navigate that?

I will be thinking hard about that because it is the context in which we operate. My primary thought is to be studiously apolitical, as the Climate Change Committee has always been and as I have been. I think I saw something in the press labelling me as this Government’s servant, which of course I am in some way but I remind people that I was appointed to the UN high-level champion role by the then Conservative Prime Minister and to the National Wealth Fund by a Conservative Chancellor, and I worked very closely with Alok Sharma and other Conservative Ministers at COP26. It is about being conscious of the fact that political consensus is less solid now than it was and not shying away from it. I don’t think there is anything to be gained by pretending that all is well when it is not. I am keen to try to get under the skin of what is driving that shift in consensus when we have such strong evidence that citizens understand the issue of climate change, understand the need for a transition and are keen to see Government acting on it, albeit that there are real nuances around different bits of the pathway, which we have to navigate with skill.

I am going to ask you questions about climate change adaptation. Before I do, I want to ask you about risk, which is obviously part of adaptation. You have a nice background, you have a good understanding of risk yourself, I would imagine. How do you feel about communicating that, which will be important for adaptation, to people who don’t have that background? To what extent do you think that you in your role will need to consider the element of political risk as opposed to the technical risks?

Communicating future hypothetical risks and non-linearity in simple terms is difficult. It is getting easier because we are experiencing the impacts of climate change now. Of course, Baroness Brown does a fantastic job of running the Adaptation Committee and we work hard to make sure that the crossover is strong. I think some of the language in the last progress report pointed to the fact that fully 30% of our roads and rails are currently at risk of flooding, and that goes to 50% by 2050. I know that is a statistic, but it is quite a simple way of telling it. It is shocking that a third to a half of that infrastructure is at risk of flooding. Maybe you could say more about your question on political risk.

You said in an answer to a previous question that you are studiously apolitical. Do you see your job as purely to present the facts about the technical risk, or do you think that you need to at least have an awareness of political risk?

Of course an awareness of political risk but I think the way that will manifest in our work is pointing out the economic and competitiveness risks of us not fulfilling our current legal commitments. Rather than using the language of politics, use the language of economics and engineering. Then politicians can do with it what they will, but to me real risk then arises. We have a leadership position in the world at the moment. We are already suffering the impacts of climate change, and it will only get worse. Our leadership position has the ability to positively influence other actors in the world, and then we have an economic opportunity to take advantage of this transition or just be the buyer of solutions in the future. There are macroeconomic and other risks that I will leave to others to translate into politics.

Moving on to the issue of climate change adaptation, the CCC progress report on adaptation published in April said that the Government’s approach was “inadequate”. What do you think are the main areas of concern, and how would you advise the Government to prioritise?

The No. 1 area of concern is the lack of clarity about what the plan is: what are the objectives here? We would be happy to provide advice on that if asked. Baroness Brown and the Committee are working on the next risk report to come out early next year, but the No. 1 advice is to be clear about what we are trying to achieve. Without that it is difficult to judge progress and difficult for different actors in society to know what is expected of them and what their role is. It starts with saying, “Here are the risks and here is what we are aiming to do over a long enough period for the kind of decisions that need to be made”, which are often quite long-term things to land on CEOs’ desks, on mayors’ desks and on Ministers’ desks.

There are no other areas? That is the top priority; you don’t have any others?

Everything comes from that. The only other thing is to take heed of the rapid change in language from our financial regulators around the world from across the spectrum, whether it is the Bank of England or OBR or the OECD. Just in the last week we have heard very strong language saying that this tragedy on the horizons that Mark Carney talked about is not now a tragedy of 20 or 30 years hence. It is very real material financial stability risk in the next five years. There has been a tendency to always think that adaptation is about what will happen to somebody else sometime long in the future rather than to us now. Taking the time to understand that this is an “us now” issue not a “them then” issue is the precursor to then saying, “Let’s be serious about having a plan about what we have to do”.

You don’t think there are any particular areas of adaptation that are more important than others, for example?

Flooding is a huge issue, as I said. That risk is going from 30% to 50% and the fact that Flood Re’s cover of houses runs out in 2039, which is well within a mortgage period. That is an economic risk right now to the value of houses and to economic disruption through road and rail. I will point to that one. Of course, extreme heat and drought are also of growing importance.

We will move on. We promised to stop at 4.30 pm and we have a lot of questions still to get through. We will move on to Toby Perkins.

You were speaking, Mr Topping, about public support. We have seen evidence that while there is public support for action on climate change, it can drift away if it requires people to spend money themselves, if they feel that the expectation is on them. Does that undermine the ability of Government to get us to do what we need to do? How would you reflect on that?

I don’t think it undermines the ability of Government. It frames the requirement of Government to be conscious of that fact. That is why it is about having confidence that electric vehicle prices will, segment by segment, come to the point where sticker price parities are reached, and instruments like the recently announced grant to accelerate that are welcome. It is also why the discrepancy between electricity and gas prices is unwelcome, because that goes directly to the point you make. Although there is an incentive of £7,500, we will not be able to make the whole transition by paying £7,500 for every heat pump. We have to get the underlying economics right so that very real and understandable concern is addressed at a policy level.

What role does the CCC have in getting the general public into a more receptive place to accept changes, even if they might cost them money?

I think by engaging and communicating in a way that uses language that everybody can understand, first of all. Also by making it clear that it does not happen automatically, it actually requires policy to deliver, but mainly through being consistent in communicating and advising, for example, on the massive efficiency benefits of an electric vehicle compared to a combustion engine vehicle. That is not something that everyone necessarily understands because we have all grown up with and are so used to combustion engine vehicles. It is simply about explaining the reason there are benefits or simply explaining the reason that the lack of polluter pays is a hindrance at the moment. As I said, from our citizen panels people tell us that that really plays to their sense of fairness. It is about understanding the concerns of citizens, because it is not just about polluter pays. We get strong feedback about fairness in the transition that we should also take into consideration.

Are we missing a trick possibly on electric vehicles? A lot of the focus with Government policy has been on new electric vehicle sales, but one of the things that undermines people’s interest in buying electric vehicles is the massive drop-off in prices a year, two years down the line. The price of second-hand electric vehicles is massively reduced and that puts people off buying them. Do you think we have too much focus on trying to get people to buy brand-new ones and not enough on supporting the second-hand market price to be better?

I don’t think so. I think the fact that we have cheap second-hand electric vehicles is helpful in accelerating adoption. The people who are already on their second electric vehicle have helped pump-prime the second-hand. We are about 25% pure electric by market share now and close to 50% across pure electric and hybrid. That transition is going quite well. Our modelling suggests that because of the shift in costs we will be at about 94% market share by 2030. I think the combination of the prices coming down, bits of fiscal support and the mandate is driving that at a healthy and consistent rate.

We are very aware that the judgment of the policymaker is more challenging and more nuanced than the technocratic advice. For example, on this issue I have talked a lot—and I promise I will keep talking about it—about the policy costs of electricity and gas. We have provided some illustrative scenarios of how shifting those in different ways might affect the firgures in gas prices. We have some distribution analysis in the last report that looks at how policy packages are fixed. Our statutory job is to provide advice to Government and Parliament to meet the legally binding budget and target. We don’t expect Governments to always do exactly what we suggest as option 1 or option 2 or option 3, but if Government decide to not do something, which means that we will not make the emissions reductions, we will have to call that out because that is a statutory obligation. If the Government decide to go one way rather than another to get to the same goal, that is exactly the nuanced judgment that we know policymakers have to make.

We talk about that a lot in our adaptation work. I used the OBR analysis to point to a counterfactual for the reliance on gas. It may be helpful for us to talk more about that. We know that it is difficult to engage people, policymakers, or the general public, on the counterfactuals, even although those counterfactuals are very real. As I say, that is getting easier now as the mainstream financial organisations are starting to model risk in a more robust way that brings an awareness of risk and the fact that risk has often been underpriced in the market to attempt it. That may be something for us to pay more attention to, yes.

Thank you for signalling it. Ms Polly Billington: It’s alright; it just gives you a bit of time to think—or to panic. If we were going to send you into a TV studio in the next 20 minutes, how would you make the case for why this is important and imperative, bearing in mind you are likely to be up against somebody who is saying it will cost too much and it is all nonsense?

Climate change is very real. It is happening right now. We can see it all around the world because of wildfires, floods, extreme heat. Anyone who is a gardener or a farmer knows that the seasons are changing. It is, of course, an environmental issue but it is also very much an economic issue and a health issue. The world has decided that we have to tackle it. We are one of the major economies and we are a protagonist in it. In that transition, there are huge risks and huge opportunities, and it is for us to decide whether we want to avoid the big risks and take the big opportunities or be passive and more susceptible to the risks and have less chance of taking the opportunities. Being on the front foot means we have more chance of avoiding the big risks and taking the big opportunities. The big opportunities are economic ones of saving money and building supply chains to supply not just our own needs but the world in areas where we have deep engineering and financial expertise. It is real, it is affecting everybody already and it is only going to get worse. We have collectively agreed to fix it, and it is up to us to make the best of playing our role in fixing it.

I think by a combination of working hard to listen but also being quite stubborn in speaking. As I say, I really understand why there is concern around electricity prices, and there is political consensus there, but the conversation immediately bifurcates because of the narratives around what is causing that. It is about focusing on where there is political consensus and providing advice that recognises that and suggests ways forward for that, but also being quite robust in countering narratives that we don’t think are fact-based or evidence-based. It is always about looking for where there is still consensus, and there is often more consensus than the media might like to point out. There is often consensus around health, jobs, the cost of electricity and competitiveness. There are then disputes about the best way to get there, but we have strong evidence that shows that continuing on the trajectory that we are on, with some very nuanced judgments, allows us to optimise the outcomes for this country as we navigate this.

We have had discussions in the ESNZ Committee—I don’t know about the EAC—that the language is part of the problem. It puts people off. The use of terms like “net zero” or “just transition” or even “climate change” alienates people. Do you agree with that? Do you think there is better language we might use?

In any specialist endeavour we have to develop a specialist vocabulary. With the Select Committees and the Climate Change Committee we can talk with a common vocabulary, but we need to be careful not to take a technical vocabulary or a specialist vocabulary into domains where we are not talking with people who—

Give us one example of how we should be selling this to the public, a simple phrase.

Look at the childhood pulmonary health benefits, the reduction in asthma cases in a city where people are driving electric buses and electric cars compared to combustion engines. You don’t need to say anything about climate change. There is a benefit to the health of your children if we shift to this new technology. It is always trying to meet people where their most emotive concerns are rather than with the GHD spreadsheet that we carry in the back of our heads.

According to the Climate Change Committee we cannot hit our net zero targets without carbon capture and storage. Do you have confidence in the technology?

Yes, we have a very considered approach to which technologies we include in our balanced pathways, which means that we never include technologies that have not at least got to—to use a technical term—TRL6, technology readiness level 6, so that they have actually been demonstrated in the real world. Importantly, our reliance on carbon capture and storage has reduced as other bits of the pathway and other technologies have improved but, yes, to the limited extent that we have it in the pathway, we are confident. That approach to having only technologies that have already been proven means there are potential upsides, because sometimes technologies can come along very quickly—not often, and of course we are in the last 25 years now, but there are potential upsides from that cautious approach.

Do proven technologies include direct air capture and storage and is that something the Government should be pursuing?

I was in Kenya recently visiting a direct air capture plant, so it is a real technology, it is happening. It is a particularly good example of a very early-stage technology that is currently extremely expensive. It is small-scale still, but it is at the proving stage. This is a good example of the kind of technology we should be cautious about including and thinking about anything at scale with risks of being the technology unicorn, but I don’t think that means we should ignore the potential. The business that I visited has already seen a 20% cost reduction from the first unit that they built. One of the things that was really interesting is that a lot of the cost is in what they call balance of plant, which is just standard engineering kit like pumps and filters. We know that the cost of that goes down with scale, so 60% of the cost is balance of plant, and you know you can get that down by 90%. There are plausible pathways to get that technology to a scale where it is relevant, but it is not something that we rely on in the pathways to a large extent and we are cautious about the newer technologies and assumptions around them.

What is your opinion on the suggestion I hear all the time, and I am sure you do, that carbon capture and storage encourages the continuance of fossil fuel extraction and use?

Historically, many models have used carbon capture and storage, as we have said, to close the model. We do everything we can to get down by 70% and then say, “Let’s use carbon capture and storage to close the gap”. We are all a little bit older and wiser now because it has been a promised solution, but it has not got to scale. The really important issue is that without policy, without business models, we will not we will not get deployment, and we will not get to scale. We have made progress recently with some of the clusters and some of the first contracts, but we also need offtake agreements with the cement or steel plants. We need to be cautious that we do not use it as a fantasy to close the model. We know that we will need to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. Again, I think of Piers, who is an atmospheric scientist and the rest of the Committee who are clear on that, but we are cautious about using a different approach to our assessment of that technology than to other technologies.

Can you say what impact you think climate change is having on nature and how the state of nature is affecting our ability to tackle climate change?

It goes two ways; our continued destruction of habitats is one of the main drivers of climate change, and climate change is changing the seasons, it is changing patterns of migration, and we know that we are getting to the point where we risk some of the so-called climate tipping points such as the dieback of the Amazon. One reason I think the COP in Belém in Brazil is going to be so important is that we do have to address the fundamental economic issues underlying our continued extraction from nature. After all, we ultimately rely on it, so it is both the cause of climate change and, again, in one of the classic feedback loops, suffering as a result of it. As we see, rainfall patterns and the distribution of species are being changed as a result of climate change.

Given the negative feedback loop you have just outlined, what degree of priority do you think the Committee on Climate Change should give to it in its reporting and recommendations? Do you want to see it emphasised more?

In particular, we have emphasised the importance of increasing woodland cover from 13% to 16% and increasing the proportion of our peatlands that are wetted, I think from roughly 25% to over 50%. Those are two quite straightforward messages, I think. Beyond that, we are into the complexity of our overall approach to land management and the relationship between food, land, and nature. That is a significant part of our pathway and our reports. As we get more confident in the power and the EVs, some of these areas of the heat industry and land use become the ones we collectively need to focus on to make sure we have the evidence right and then the policy set-up right, so that improvements are delivered in the ‘30s and ‘40s. It rises up the league table in terms of the level of attention that we need to pay to it.

So you anticipate it becoming a more important area of focus?

Yes.

Claire Young, you have questions on technologies, if you want to have a final question on that topic. It is the only thing we have not picked up so far. In the meantime, Mike Reader has a quick question.

Thank you, Chair. You have nudged me. The advice given by the Committee is often founded on complex modelling. Through your answers, you have shown a particularly good understanding of the outputs and the headlines, but how do you make sure that when you interrogate technical assumptions in the work of the Committee, it is founded in solid evidence?

A lot of the work of the Committee is asking exactly those questions. I can give you one example to illustrate this question of where technologies are going. There is a very well-understood dynamic, so-called Wright’s law, of quite consistent learning effects, that costs come down quite consistently with every doubling of deployment. Once a technology, such as solar, wind, batteries, or EVs, is some way down its transition, that becomes quite predictable. Obviously, it can be bumped by economic events that lead to inflation and supply chain constraints, but the learning process is pretty predictable. It is much less predictable early on, so you often get quite a range of evidence in the literature, and one of the things that we have been particularly focusing on in CB7 is interrogating exactly what assumption we are making in that range. This is also something that we keep coming back to. As with any prediction, you are never right, but we want to make sure we are as close to the middle as possible, not always on the low side or always on the on the booster side. That is one piece of advice. Another thing that the modelling always considers is not just the costs but the constraints, which we have talked about a bit, and which could be capital, could be infrastructure, could be skills.

Much of the focus on the electrification of domestic heating has been on heat pumps. How is that focus distracting the basic message of electrification of domestic heating more generally, and should the Government be talking about other electrical heating methods, for example, infrared heating?

One thing the Government should be doing is ruling out hydrogen for domestic heat. We try not to be policy and technology prescriptive until the evidence suggests that there is a technology lock-in, as we call it. I remember some work with one of the European car manufacturers about six years ago. They were still developing hydrogen cars and battery cars, and then they decided that the world had decided we are going down the battery route, so they stopped with hydrogen. It is not that it is not possible to make a hydrogen fuel cell car; it is just that you can’t keep developing everything all the time. We are right to point to heat pumps. We also point to district heating networks as an alternative solution, but the primary solution we see is heat pumps.

We are lobbied by people who say that hydrogen still has a role in fuel cells in cars and in home heat.

Yes, I know, but you need to ask them for the evidence for that, and the evidence does not back that up. They are lobbying you, so of course they are people who have a vested interest in gas infrastructure.

Always.

If I can come back then, you said that it was not your role, not a core part of your role, to recommend technologies, but you do seem to have some quite clear views.

To be clear, our role is to provide evidence, and where the evidence suggests that the world, the market, is locking into a particular technology for reasons of performance and cost, our advice will follow that. Where there is more uncertainty, we will often maintain optionality further on in the pathway. I am familiar with the fuel cell versus battery debate. Twenty years ago, it was definitely unknown. Ten years ago, there was still some debate, but five years ago, even Toyota, which desperately tried to persist with the hydrogen car solution— There will, of course, be people who persist with those technologies that have currently lost out, and maybe they will prove the world wrong, and maybe those technologies will come back, but the technology lock-in matters for all sorts of things. It is not just the technology: it is charging; it is the servicing; it is the skills, and the world can’t flip-flop between one technology standard and another on a sixpence. That tends to happen that you end up with a technology. People of my age will remember the VHS versus Betamax debate.

You have sparked a lot of interest around the room—Polly Billington first.

That is a good point. Scope matters, as you say. Where we are looking at decommissioning costs that have not already been factored in, that should be a consideration.

If it is in our timescale scope. One of our limitations is that our scope ends in 2050 and some of this decommissioning will be after 2050. It would be the sort of thing that, if directed, we would be happy to look at.

The hydrogen debate, I think, is very much alive, particularly in aviation. You have not said anything about hydrogen in aviation, but you could ultimately be at odds with the industry. I know that Airbus, for example, is trying to develop a hydrogen plane. They have put off the decision a little bit, but they are still very much in that space of wanting to see hydrogen as a solution for aviation, which is one of the most difficult sectors to decarbonise. How are you not sitting at odds with all that development that might ultimately be a good solution?

I do not think we are at odds with the development. We follow it very carefully. I engage quite a lot with Professor Rob Miller at the Aviation Impact Accelerator at the Whittle Lab in Cambridge, which is the leading research lab in the world, thinking about this and thinking about all the different technology pathways. There are two ways in which hydrogen can be used in aviation. There are fuel cells. I mentioned AeroAvia. That is their choice, but so far, that looks like it is for relatively short hops, not intercontinental flights. Then, of course, there are the power to liquids, later generation sustainable aviation fuels, not the current HEFA ones that are based on biomass, but the later ones. Hydrogen is part of our assessment, but we do not have hydrogen planes at TRL 6 at the moment, so we are cautious about including that as a unicorn technology to get us out of jail for free, but we do follow it very carefully. As those technologies come down in cost and are commercialised—this is one of the things I talked about—we may have some upsides. The thing with hydrogen is that we have very low volumes right now and at a very high cost. We have to get the cost down, the volumes up, and the technology to turn them into sustainable aviation fuel. There are still quite a few steps that need to be taken, but we track all that very carefully.

This is opening a new line of inquiry. Anna Gelderd has a question, and then we must finish.

We have heard some very useful and important reflections on your interactions with a range of stakeholders, from politicians to industry, but are there any other voices that you would like to see brought to the table in your role in the future?

The Committee and the team do a pretty good job of reaching across multiple stakeholder groups. Obviously, if we are talking about food, land, and land use, we have to talk to farmers. If we are talking about just transitions in particular sectors, we need to talk to people in those communities and those industries. I mentioned earlier that it would probably be helpful for us to talk a bit more with the finance sector. In my experience, getting a horse’s mouth view from a private sector point of view about what is stopping things from going faster can be helpful in honing where we look for advice, and for evidence and what advice we give. That would be the one stakeholder group we are maybe a bit under-engaged with at the moment.

Thank you very much, Nigel Topping, for your answers to our questions today. When we close the meeting, we will make a decision, a decision taken by the members of the ESNZ Committee, but we will take advice from our colleagues from the EAC. Thank you very much for this afternoon. That is the end of this session.