Welcome, everybody, to the latest meeting of the Environmental Audit Committee as part of our review into carbon budget 7. I am very pleased to be joined by a distinguished panel. I will encourage them to introduce themselves and then we will go into questions.

Thank you very much. It is good to be here. My name is Toby Park. I am the director of climate, energy and sustainability at the Behavioural Insights Team. Some of you may be more familiar with BIT as the original nudge unit that was created in 10 Downing Street. We are now a global social purpose consultancy, but we essentially focus on behaviour change and the social dimensions of policy issues, with my focus being climate and environment.

Hello. I am Lorraine Whitmarsh. I am a professor of environmental psychology at the University of Bath and director of the UK Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations or CAST for short, where we look at the role that people play in tackling climate change and particularly things such as behaviour change, public engagement with climate change and so on.

Good afternoon. My name is Polly Cook and I am the chief officer for climate, energy and green spaces at Leeds City Council. In terms of the climate aspect of my role, I have responsibility for the policy side and for projects and delivery.

I will start with you, Mr Park. One Toby to another, how big a part are household choices going to play in the UK achieving consistency with the carbon budget 7 forecast?

The short answer is quite a lot, as the CCC spells out. Across the whole net zero journey from now to 2050, a little over 60% of emissions reductions that we need depend on some element of behaviour change. Even the other 38%, which is thought of as more supply side, is not free from issues of public support and so on. Infrastructure investment, et cetera, still requires public engagement. The nuance there is that, when we say “consumer choice”, “household choice” or “behaviour change”, we potentially mean a variety of things. As behavioural scientists, we tend to think of that in terms of outcomes. For example, you could think about having more heat pumps in homes as behaviour change. There is a big difference, practically, politically and ethically, in terms of, say, depending wholly on direct voluntary action amongst households to go out and buy heat pumps in the world as it currently is, with all the frictions, cost barriers, et cetera. If you think of that as relying on choice, that is a big challenge versus, say, addressing those barriers, creating a world in which heat pumps are affordable, the default choice, socially normative, et cetera. We would still think of that as a behavioural aspect of net zero, but there is more or less onus put on individuals in making that choice, depending on those political choices. Whichever way you cut it, we have to engage the public significantly on a wide range of the decarbonisation challenges.

Professor Whitmarsh, on the basis of what we have seen so far in the however many years since 1992 and the real push towards recognising climate change and the need for people to make different choices, what lessons can we learn about how easy that is going to be? What might the Government want to reflect upon in terms of how it has gone so far?

There is quite a clear evidence base around what works to change behaviour and so far how effectively that has been implemented in Government. A couple of years ago, the House of Lords did an inquiry on behaviour change for climate and environmental goals, which also gathered together a lot of the evidence on this. Essentially, it is clear—this is also reflected in the CCC’s advice—that the public support the need for behaviour change to achieve net zero and wider environmental targets, but that support is quite contingent. It assumes that they have help and that it is easier, cheaper, more accessible, more affordable and more attractive for them to make those changes. At the moment, there are significant barriers for them to do those things. The evidence base shows that you need multiple policy levers to remove those barriers. It also shows that fairness is very important. Often one of the most important factors that predicts policy support is how fair the public see those measures being. That is important in terms of thinking about winners and losers and ensuring that people are having a say in those policies. There is quite a lot to show that Government have not gone far enough to remove those barriers.

Are the behavioural change and technology adoption assumptions in CB7 realistic, given customer confidence, the costs associated with new technologies and where we are right now?

Broadly, yes. Those are realistic assumptions. They do reflect the fact that people will not by themselves make these changes when there are very significant up-front costs. Many of these changes will require extra time and inconvenience. Those things have to be addressed if people are going to change their behaviour. That is very much reflected in the advice. I would say, though, that they may be rather conservative in the estimates that they have around what could be achieved through behaviour change and lifestyle change and therefore place greater emphasis on technologies, some of which are not entirely proven. There is still scope for them to be developed. There are uncertainties about some of the engineered removals that they talk about. For example, around flying, there is more emphasis on engineered removals than there is on reducing demand. That is one area where there is a lot of optimism around what technology can do and maybe a bit more conservatism around what might be possible for households to change behaviour.

You think that Government or the CCC could be more ambitious in terms of expecting greater behaviour change, if Government put the right levers in place.

That is right, exactly. They have looked at historical trends, international case studies and what the evidence and theory says is possible, but some of these areas are completely unprecedented. No Government have seriously tried to reduce flying, so we do not know exactly what would work. We do know—the CCC’s own citizens’ panel shows this—that the public is willing to support increased prices on airline tickets to cover the cost of decarbonisation. There is potential to go further in that direction. Yes, they have been a bit conservative.

Ms Cook, as well as climate and environment-related concerns, UK households are also facing challenges in terms of cost of living and health. What are the most significant co-benefits of behaviour change to reduce emissions that should be communicated to the public?

Whenever we do anything within the council, we will always lead with the co-benefits beyond the environmental because we know that at the moment the environmental issue can be quite divisive. Fuel poverty and the reduction of bills is a key element that we lead with in any of the housing retrofit schemes that we have done or the district heating network that we have installed. We talk about the reduction that individual tenants or house owners have found. With health, when we were looking at our clean air policy for the city, we did some specific focus groups and we found that things such as childhood asthma had more impact. People were more interested in that than if you talk about, for example, health benefits related to things such as cancer. We are talking about clean air within homes as well as the modal shifts on our streets, but we are also talking about having a nicer place to live. It is talking about creating better environments, greener locations, fewer cars on the streets and safer streets. All those things about the quality of place and regeneration resonate more.

Can you think of examples of messages that you have tried to get across that have not worked, where the public have maybe not responded in the way that you expected?

If you go out with messages such as fuel poverty and health, it is quite difficult for people to say, “We do not like those messages”. We would always include the carbon savings and things, but we would lead with the co-benefits. We have done that pretty much from day one. We have not had that kind of strong reaction.

Mr Park, what is the most important message to the public in order to increase support for the net zero transition?

It is not a case of having one silver bullet, sadly. Different messages will resonate with different people based on their values, their living circumstances, their means, et cetera. A general point that we can make, though, is that we should not always fall into the trap of assuming we have to talk directly about the climate and the environment. There are lots of good reasons to take steps that reduce our personal emissions that sit outside of that particular motivational factor, be it saving money on bills, increasing thermal comfort in your home or improving the property value of your home, et cetera. There is also an important distinction, when you are talking about communications and public support, between boosting support for green policy and the climate agenda writ large and increasing support for individual action that people can take. Those are two quite different things. The former is very much a question of a public good with public costs attached to it. Messages that highlight the public benefits tend to work quite well. If you want to boost support for green policy, you can talk about the benefits of the environment because people do care about the environment. We see that consistently in survey data. Even though people may not be taking huge steps in their own life for lots of good reasons, they care about the environment. They support, on aggregate, pro-environmental policy. Of course, you can also talk about economic growth, energy security, et cetera. Those are big public good issues and public good policies. When it comes down to individual action, you are generally better off emphasising the individual benefits that go along with those actions: “You can take action in your home and you will be warmer; you will save money on your bills; and you will increase your property value”, et cetera. We should be thinking about how those two things match up.

It feels like something slightly from the past, Ms Cook, but I was a councillor at the time when we introduced, first, a second bin and then a third bin. Initially, there was great resistance to it. Over a period of time, people got pretty contented with it and were aware of what different bins were for and so on and seemed pretty much on board. Suddenly it became a political issue and people would say, “There are too many bins”, and then the public started questioning it. How important is the consistency of message? In local government, do you find that central Government give you mixed messages in terms of what they want?

Some of the changes in policy over the years do not help. If we take the waste strategy, it has been quite slow coming forward with all the guidance. There have been lots of headlines and the implementation of that has been quite slow. That creates uncertainty for us, but it also creates uncertainty for our residents. It means we cannot give clear messages. We have had similar with things such as solar panels. There was a big push for putting solar panels on with the feed-in tariffs. It suddenly went very quickly overnight and created a sort of boom and bust. All of that creates challenges for us. Look at EV vehicles at the moment. There is talk about different parties having different policies going forward. All of that makes people step back and think, “Is this the right thing to do? What is going to change? What is going to be the value of my vehicle?” Having consistency and having a long-term committed view is probably the most important thing that anyone can do. Certainly, it would make our dialogue with our residents much easier if we were talking from the same page as national Government. Quite often local authorities are trying to go quicker. If you look at the targets around local authorities, they are more ambitious than the national government targets because we can see the benefit of doing it. We can see the co-benefits. Consistency, ambition and bringing those into alignment would be really key.

Yes, it is a good question. For those of us that care deeply about this issue, it is a concerning emergent trend, but it is still fairly early days. If you look at the data that is out there on public support, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, for climate policy and net zero, it has stayed admirably robust against many big changes over the last several years, through Brexit, covid, multiple PMs and changes of Government, the cost of living and Ukraine. It is still high. As I say, it is still early days in terms of some of that more contrarian and challenging rhetoric that we are seeing. We live in a time with quite a fragmented information space. It is very easy for us to latch on to our own little version of the truth. In that context, consistency is quite important. Part of the reason that the UK has done so well historically to date on our emissions reduction is because of the cross-party consensus that we have had where it is not routinely challenged. It does not surprise me that we are getting more of that challenge now. It is not just the zeitgeist and the political mood of the day; it also reflects the fact that we are running out of low-hanging fruit on the decarbonisation agenda in the UK. We have done a lot of the stuff that is upstream and does not really impact consumers day to day. Most people have not been aware that we have removed almost all coal from our system, et cetera. We are now moving on to the kind of stuff that does affect people’s lives more directly in households, so it is going to become a little bit more politically contentious. The other reason that consistency really matters is not just thinking about consumers and households; it is thinking about markets, businesses and particularly investors. Losing the certainty that ambitious climate change policy is a given over the long term very much undermines the confidence and investment that we need to make these transitions. It is important. It is something that we have taken for granted for many years. It is something we should be looking at closely.

We can look at the research, like Toby said, and it shows a really positive message. The risk is that people do not necessarily feel what the research is reflecting. From a local councillor point of view, the people at the coalface—that is probably the wrong expression to use—are feeling that there is more negativity than the reality is. Some of those voices are quite aggressive and quite loud. If you look on social media, they dominate. People will not come back and answer because there are pile-ons and things. There is a real risk of things such as misinformation and disinformation really taking hold. The research shows something different, but it does not necessarily feel like that. There is a risk that it blows out of proportion what is happening at the moment.

This is an interesting question because we have not really had much explicit climate change messaging or campaigns from the Government in recent years. There have been some policies. That is perceived by the public. We have done some work to contrast how the public saw covid versus climate change. The public inferred the severity of the risk of covid from the policy response. The lockdowns were unprecedented and the sorts of changes that we were seeing and that we were being asked to make to our lifestyles were so unheard of that people assumed that this was the greatest risk that we had ever seen. By contrast, when we talk to people about climate change and the extent to which they see this as a serious risk, there is a sense in which they infer that it is not very serious from the fact that the Government are not going further and that some of the policies are rather inconsistent around airport expansion, investing in oil fields and so on. That messaging is implicit in the policy measures or mix of policy measures that are coming through.

That is another big challenge. The first thing to say is that there is quite a bit of misinformation out there, but, more than that, on some issues there is a sort of negativity bias that may not fall strictly into the bucket of explicitly misinformation or disinformation. We did an interesting piece of work, essentially doing some data science analysis on both social media and mainstream media content online, particularly around heat pumps. We found that negatively framed information significantly outweighed positively framed information. In fact, it also outweighed neutrally framed information. That is everything from the big broadsheet newspapers to Facebook, Mumsnet and so on. That is things such as heavily implying negative outcomes from people who have installed a heat pump and so on. We have also found in surveys that, for instance, a clear majority of people think that heat pumps do not work in cold weather and are not well suited to British homes and that you have to replace the battery in an electric vehicle every three to five years. If you believe these things, you are not going to be supportive of making these changes. We need to do more to overcome those negativity biases. To some extent, they are understandable. We all tend to have a bit of a scepticism around new technologies that are unproven and so on. Of course, there is often a little grain of truth in some of these claims, which is why they are so potent. Of course there are going to be examples where people’s homes are not well suited to heat pumps, and those negative stories tend to spread. In terms of how you address it, it is a challenge. There is a lot of good research on disinformation and misinformation. One thing that you generally should not do is regurgitate the misinformation itself even in an attempt to address it because it just increases the exposure to that narrative. Going back to the point of consistency, we want consistency of messaging and ideally distributed consistency. That is many messengers not parroting the same verbatim thing but giving a broadly similar narrative. We want trusted messengers. That can mean different people in different contexts. It could be our neighbours or peers who have had good experiences. It could be boiler engineers who are encouraging heat pump adoption rather than guarding against them, which is typically what we see. It could be credible experts. We want credibility and expertise, but we also want trust, impartiality and aligned incentives from those messengers. In a sense, we can focus on the actions we want people to take without necessarily focusing too much on winning the broader net zero narrative. If you want to get heat pumps in buildings, you can talk about bills and comfort. If you want to get electric vehicles on roads, you can talk about performance, saving money on fuel, benefiting from time-of-use tariffs, et cetera. We do not always have to win the argument on these actions that we want people to take through a broader argument about net zero. We can also go directly to the actions and argue for those for other reasons that really resonate with people’s day-to-day lives.

Can I ask a tiny follow-up? I was interested in the very last thing you said there, Toby, about not always having to persuade people to do something for the reason that we think it is a good idea. Are you familiar with Common Cause’s values and frames work from a good long time, 10 or 15 years ago now? That basically differentiated between extrinsic and intrinsic values. The danger of appealing to somebody to turn off the light because it will save them money rather than because it is good to save energy is that you might make that particular behaviour more likely, but you are reinforcing a self-serving value set in the long term. What is your response to that?

You ideally want to achieve both. We need to be pragmatic and realise that people might be more likely to turn off the lights to save money than to be good for the planet. That is almost a slightly ruthlessly pragmatic strategic choice. At the same time, you want to drag along for good measure an interpretation of that behaviour that they have done it for good intrinsic reasons as well so that you do not create what we call negative spillovers or rebound effects on other behaviours and so on. The challenge is that, if you just go for values and you try to convince everyone that they should be living life on eco mode for the betterment of the planet despite all the cost and hassle implications that come with that, we are just not going to get where we need to get to. To some extent, we have to accept and leverage people’s other self-interests. Saving money is a perfectly reasonable desire, for example. We have to use those where we can, but, at the same time, we have to try to couch it in a narrative that we are doing this for good reasons, not just to be ruthless.

Following on this theme of effective communication, as Mr Park has pointed out, I love that phrase, “contrarian rhetoric”. That is a very nice way of putting what is been going on. In your view, Mr Park—I will also address this question to Professor Whitmarsh—how can the Government best communicate what it means by “net zero” and the associated policies and co-benefits?

We developed a little framework recently, which I am happy to forward on to the Committee, if it is of interest, which we call the four As framework. That stands for awareness, acceptance, access and adoption. This is our attempt to lay out what is the strategic function of Government communications or non-Government communications around net zero and climate. It is not just a framework that we have plucked out of thin air. Each of those letters is built on quite a bit of evidence and a number of challenges that need to be addressed. On the awareness front, for example, people broadly do not know what they should be doing. They do not broadly know what the Government are doing. They do not broadly know what the plan is and how it is going to impact their lives. There are big awareness challenges there. When I say that people do not know what they should be doing, we see a negative correlation between the perceived importance of specific green actions and their actual impact on the environment. We focus way too much on things such as recycling or not using plastic straws and massively underestimate the impact of changing our heating system, driving an electric car, et cetera. On the acceptance point, we are talking about the acceptance of green policy and the acceptance of new green technologies. This goes back to the point that I mentioned about misinformation and disinformation and negativity bias. We need to sell these technologies more convincingly and we need to sell the policy solutions more convincingly. Lorraine mentioned things such as fairness, which is super important. We have tested dozens and dozens of hypothetical and real climate policies for public support. We see an extraordinarily tight correlation between support for that policy and the perceived fairness of that policy. That is really important. On access, Lorraine also mentioned that there is not that much cut‑through on messaging from Government around these issues. We have seen that on specific issues such as the boiler upgrade scheme for heat pump grants. The vast majority of people do not think there is any financial support from Government on heat pumps. They are not aware of it. You are not increasing people’s access to a technology if they do not know that the support is there. On adoption or action, that is where we can really introduce the calls to action, once we have done all of that groundwork. We would advise things such as using the right timely moments of change. If you are targeting people as they are moving home, they are much more likely to retrofit, for example. As they are moving job, maybe they will be more inclined to adopt public transport instead of sticking with old habits and so on. There is a whole bunch of techniques that you can bring in there as well. The four As is kind of a strategic thing. We need to raise awareness; we need to boost acceptance for technologies and policy; we need to improve access so that people can do the things that we want them to do; and we then need to drive action where we can.

As a supplementary question to that, does net zero have issues as a branding umbrella? Does it make sense as a phrase or can it come across as a little bit technocratic?

We were talking about this over lunch. Do you want to come in on that?

The evidence is clear that it is not a phrase that resonates widely amongst the public. It is indeed a technocratic phrase. In fact, it is starting to polarise. Certain voter groups in particular react negatively to the phrase. There is a new-ish report by Climate Outreach called Britain Talks Climate and Nature. It did some interesting comparisons looking at the extent to which the public would support net zero policy. They had various other different framings. Just talking about net zero policy, they had about 50% support. When they talked about it in more general terms and brought in co-benefits—they were talking about climate policy that delivers health benefits, safety benefits, benefits for nature, benefits for future generations and so on; they wrapped in a lot of co-benefits—that went up to 78% support. Moving away from net zero is definitely helpful, particularly talking about some of those wider benefits and the tangible things that Polly has mentioned and leading with those much more positive and tangible benefits that people can experience. We have found that there are some interesting differences. If you are trying to get people to reduce car use, that is somewhat divisive. There is broad abstract public support for the idea of not driving so much. Depending on the particular policy, there are very different levels of support. We have seen high-profile protests against ULEZ, some of the low-traffic neighbourhoods and so on. School streets are also about reducing car use, but they are very much led by local communities. They are a grassroots initiative and they are very much framed around child safety and making streets safer, cleaner and so on, particularly for young people. That seems to have a much more galvanising framing that works, even though the outcome is similar to these policies that are differently framed. It really matters what benefits you are emphasising and who is initiating, leading and involved in some of that decision-making. More grassroots involvement helps a lot.

I have another question for Mr Park. What forms of communication have you found to be the most effective? What are the trusted voices or messengers that should be delivering this message?

I started to allude to this earlier. Trusted messengers are really important. We talk a lot about messenger effects. The identity of the messenger is often as or more important than the content of the message. It will vary depending on the context and the people you are communicating to. Trust is really important. When I say “trust”, we mean some sense of impartiality or aligned incentives so people do not think there is an ulterior motive. Credibility might come from recognised expertise or personal experience and so on. If you are talking about retrofitting your home for the purpose of saving money on bills, for example, you might want to look to the likes of Martin Lewis or people who are respected in that space. Of course, it will be quite different if you are trying to encourage people to get an electric vehicle and you want to address people’s concerns about performance, range or whatever. That might come from a different voice. There is also this term, “convert communicators”, which is quite a cute idea that has been shown to be effective. If people like you have gone on a transition or a journey, if they were previously a bit sceptical about heat pumps but decided to get one and it is amazing, that makes for a very compelling, credible messenger. It is interesting to think about how you leverage these kinds of messengers. It is one thing to do a conventional campaign and paying to use a celebrity’s face, but you can do other things as well, such as refer-a-friend scheme ideas for grants for electric vehicles, for example. The most likely people to be the next batch to buy electric vehicles are probably more likely than average to know someone else who has already got an electric vehicle. You can use those networking effects and so on. We have also done some work on encouraging boiler engineers to install their first heat pump for free. We pay for the heat pump. They do it in their mum’s house or whatever. Those individuals are often a little bit sceptical about heat pumps. They have been installing boilers for 40 years. Giving them that first-hand experience can create those convert communicators. Indeed, our colleagues at Nesta, our partner organisation, have created a visit-a-heat-pump scheme, where you can go online and find a heat pump that has been installed in a house within a kilometre of your house. You can go and visit, have a chat with those people, learn about it, et cetera. Using those kinds of messages in perhaps slightly more creative ways can be really important.

Professor Whitmarsh, the Climate Change Committee has come up with 10,000 different property archetypes in their pathway. That is a mind-boggling number. That is quite a range. How can communication be made most effective across that range of archetypes?

Yes, they make use of those archetypes. The other thing that they do is disaggregate households by income type. They have person A, person B and person C. They are representative of the bottom, middle and top 20% of income groups in the UK. It is really interesting to see not only how carbon emissions increase very significantly the more income increases, but also the composition of carbon footprint within those households. The emissions from heating and driving increase, but most starkly it is flying. The lowest 20% are not flying at all. The top 20% are flying quite a lot. Dietary emissions do not change very much. Disaggregating emissions in that way is really helpful because we can then see where policy could target more discretionary sorts of emissions. Flying is an interesting case. It came out again, as I say, in the CCC’s citizens’ panel that there was greater acceptance for consumers to be paying more for airline tickets because they could see that that was a behaviour that was more discretionary and the people who were doing more flying are polluting more. The polluter-pays principle tends to be something that we see as important in acceptance. Yes, it is important. Those income-type archetypes help to point the way towards some of the ways in which policy can be targeted. As has already been mentioned, values and motivations vary across different household types. Again, Britain Talks Climate and Nature points to those different motivations. We can also pinpoint messaging according to what people care about, whether that be national security, environment or something else. Yes, it is helpful to disaggregate, but, equally, we also need to look at what is common across very different groups, not least because, if we want to convey quite consistent messaging, it is helpful to point to some of these commonalities. For example, we know nature, future generations and avoiding waste are frames that work across political segments and across these very different groups of people. It is helpful to look at these different archetypes in order to pinpoint policies to remove the barriers that these different groups might experience, but we also need to look at what is consistent across them.

All I would add is that this exercise of segmenting is really valuable because, as Lorraine said, you can really pinpoint and tailor policy support and communications, et cetera, to align with values and circumstances. Sometimes segmentation exercises lean very heavily on distinctions in people’s attitudes and values, which is great. That is an important part of it, but it is also really useful, from a behaviour change perspective, to think about how people differ in terms of the specific barriers that they face to the behaviours we want them to adopt. I have already mentioned people who move home, for example. You would not typically think of home movers as a segment, necessarily, but people who are moving home are often getting a mortgage, so they have access to low-cost finance, if they want to get a green mortgage extension to pay for retrofits, heat pumps, et cetera. They are probably thinking, for a brief moment in their life, about the long-term value of property, investment and so on. They might be doing some light-touch renovations and redecoration anyway so disruption in the household is less of a problem and so on. These moments in people’s lives are quite precious windows of opportunity. About two-thirds of boiler replacements are distress purchases. In other words, they happen when a boiler breaks down, which is often in the middle of the winter. You need to replace it within 24 hours. You are going to get another boiler because you cannot get a heat pump that quickly. You are then locked into fossil fuels for another 15 years. Thinking about the sequential process and the moments in people’s lives that can crack open those otherwise quite locked-in patterns and defaults is really important. My broader point is that there are other ways of thinking about segmentation through a more explicitly behaviour change lens rather than just slicing up the population by attitudinal and income brackets, for example.

There is one final question from me. This is for Mr Park. We have already touched on this. There is sometimes a perception that environmental concern is a bit of a middle-class luxury. How can communication and engagement be more inclusive than that, especially for those groups that often feel vulnerable or marginalised, even though those might be the ones that are most disproportionately affected by climate change impacts?

I would be super keen for others’ views on this as well. Partly it is about public engagement being genuinely and authentically two-way. It is not just about communicating outwards. It is about listening and understanding circumstances. That is not just good for the obvious reasons. It also can really increase the quality and effectiveness of policy because you get much greater diversity of ideas and so on and greater insight into people’s lives and circumstances. Of course, it also increases mandate because people feel like they are much more included and so on. To somewhat echo my previous point, it is also about understanding how the circumstances of certain groups and populations specifically relate to the behaviours that we are asking them to do. There is no point putting out a national campaign on electric vehicle adoption if that is going to people in rural Wales with no access to reliable public charging infrastructure or people without off-street parking who are dependent on public charging, which is four times as expensive and they have to carry their baby and their shopping 600 yards down the road or whatever. Being very sensitive to the particular challenges that certain groups face and tailoring policy and communications to be genuinely supportive and reflective of those circumstances is very important, not just because it otherwise would not be effective, but because it can really start to erode support for the agenda at large because it starts to alienate and frustrate people when they are being asked to do things that they cannot do or they do not feel understood and supported. I do not know whether others want to add to that.

When the council first declared a climate emergency back in 2019, we did something called the Big Leeds Climate Conversation. We did the typical online consultation and then we did something where we went out to different groups. We went to things such as Pride, the carnival and different face-to-face events. What was really interesting was the difference in representation between the two surveys. The one where we had gone out and made that additional effort and went to where people were, we got views that were representative of the population of Leeds. When we expected people to come to us and to show interest, it was not. The difference between the representation was so stark. Thinking about how you reach people is always critical. We have mentioned trusted voices. In most of our communities in Leeds, there will be a third-sector organisation that is really active doing lots of different things around food poverty or whatever that community needs. Working through some of those third-sector partners or working through schools, which can play a really big role in communities, is definitely the way. In some places that may be the local authority, but it will depend.

Thank you, panel. My first question is for Professor Whitmarsh and Ms Cook. In your experience, how does the degree of ownership of policy and delivery at local level influence sustainable behaviour change? In your response, Ms Cook, could you address the role of public engagement, which you mentioned, in the ability of local authorities to drive forward policies that will then affect system change? Could that be public consultations, surveys, citizens’ assemblies, workshops with stakeholder groups and so on?

When you look at a lot of consultations within any council—Leeds is no different—the level of response that you get can be quite poor. It is the same as you get with national Government responses. I was racking my brains before I came in here to think about where we have done something where the consultation has been really successful and why. Back when we were looking at clean air zones and things, we did so many face-to-face consultations, but the difference was that it was impacting on quite targeted groups. It was things like taxi and private hire drivers, the HGV sector or the bus sector. That made it easier, in a way, to do that outreach and talk to all the different individuals. It meant we could design support packages. We went back a number of times. The challenge is the resource-intensity and cost of doing that. You have to reflect on how practical that is. We definitely got a better outcome and a better result because of doing that, but it is not always practical. Going back more to a domestic setting, with our district heating network, there was no cost to the first 2,000 social housing tenants in multi-storey blocks. There was a bill saving, and yet there were still multiple people who did not take that up. That will be because of difficult lifestyles and not being able to understand different things. We found that we had to follow up with a housing tenant engagement officer almost permanently supporting some of those tenants and supporting the installation. It is not necessarily always about the up-front communication and engagement. Sometimes it is about how you implement it and having ongoing support. We need to recognise that. We can put something in, but, if nobody uses it, there is no point. We need to make sure that we have enough support for residents when we are making sometimes quite big changes to their lives.

I agree. A lot of the evidence suggests that at the local level you get potentially more trusted messengers. That could include local authorities, community groups and others. They can work with communities to identify the specific issues that are affecting that group. They will then be more willing to be involved in the process of policy development and delivery. Local citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ panels are really good examples. For example, I was involved in the Bath citizens’ panel on sustainable transport. By involving local citizens much more directly in the development of transport policy, the local authority felt more emboldened to go further in terms of some of the things that they were proposing to do. It does help to build a mandate and to get buy-in at the local level. Some of the work that we did as part of the access project similarly talks about mid-level actors. There is only so much that top-down Government can do. Similarly, there is only so much that grassroots actors can do. Local authorities, community organisations, employers, schools and so on are really trusted messengers. They also understand the local needs and can involve people in place-based delivery of climate policy. There is a lot of power in that local level, yes.

My next question is for Ms Cook and Mr Park. Ms Cook has already mentioned consistency at national level. Many of the levels that shape everyday behaviour, such as electricity pricing, fuel duty, building standards and regulations and rail fares sit at national level rather than local level. How do areas of misalignment between national policy and local delivery capacity affect behaviour change on the ground, Mr Park?

I might respond to that in a broadbrush way. With any behaviour change initiative or public engagement effort on climate behaviours, you need some kind of touchpoint with the consumer. At what point does the consumer interact with the communications campaign, the policy, the public service, the new incentive, the nudge or whatever it might be? Sometimes it just makes sense that that is at the local level. Sometimes it has to be at the national level. That is unavoidable. Sometimes it is not Government at all. Sometimes it might make most sense that it is delivered through supermarkets, high street banks or mortgage lenders or whatever. A huge part of the strategy needs to be building a consortium of partnerships for delivery of these initiatives. In a sense, your question answers itself. There are really important national policy instruments and regulatory standards that need to change in order to drive widespread behaviour change, but some of the delivery, down into the nuts and bolts, might well be better done at a local level. If you think about something such as heat pump adoption, you need market mechanisms that are national. You need changes to electricity prices relative to gas prices and so on. When it comes to rolling this stuff out, there is still going to be a huge advantage to having almost street-by-street or community level roll-outs so you can benefit from collective action and you can give people at the local level the support and advice that they want. It needs to be a combination of everything.

As I probably said earlier, the misalignment at the moment is not helpful. The change and the uncertainty is not helpful. I would echo what Toby said. As an example, I would look at the future homes standard, the uncertainty over that and the impact that has on our own planning policy. It keeps being delayed. We have all the ambition in the world. We have all these developments coming through. We need to get some of those policies over the line. I have talked about the waste strategy and the time that it has taken for that to come through to implementation. It also causes wasted work when local authorities are not flush with cash. Having a direction and getting there quickly is helpful for all of us.

That takes me to my last question to you, which is about funding. To what extent do local authorities currently have the powers, skills and sustained funding to deliver behaviour change at the scale that CB7 assumes?

Powers is an interesting one because nothing is stopping us from doing a behaviour change campaign. What I would say is that we have no statutory responsibility to do it as a local authority. When you are looking at budgets and where you are going to prioritise, you are going to prioritise looking after vulnerable children and adults and collecting the bins. There are certain things such as swimming lessons that are a statutory responsibility. Climate change does not feature anywhere. It has been one of the big campaigns of the Local Government Association that that is a missing part at the moment. It is not a power as such, but a statutory responsibility would change the dial on that. In terms of skills, I speak for Leeds. We are the second-biggest local authority in the country. We are lucky in the sense that we do have a lot of really competent people. We have done a lot of really large-scale delivery in terms of transport schemes. That is not necessarily replicated across all local authorities. Some are a lot smaller. From a Leeds perspective, we do have the skills. What we do not have is the funding that goes with it. That limits what we can do, especially around things such as behaviour change campaigns. When you are having to choose between looked after children or running a comms campaign, I am pretty sure most people in the room would know where that is going to fall. The funding is a massive issue, but, if somebody were to say, “You have allocated money to do this”, yes, we absolutely could do it.

I have a very quick comment on your previous discussion around the communications. I was really interested, Mr Park, when you mentioned the timeliness of change. If we are asking at the wrong moment, it is not convenient and consumers are not really open to the change. I wondered whether the opposite is also true. This Committee, and I guess you in your work as well, have done completely separate work about flooding. It is easy to get into siloed working, is it not? When we visit and talk to residents who are flooded, there is no doubt in anybody’s mind that they are flooded more often now because of climate change. When we are discussing flooding with them, we are all in the room discussing how we can help them prepare for more flooding because of climate change. That would also be true when we had those really high heat waves last year or the year before. I am wondering whether it is also the case that there are these spike moments when residents are directly experiencing those impacts and they no longer contest them, even if they disagree with everything else. It might be that preparing some campaigns for those moments say, “We know you have been affected by this consequence of climate change. Here is a list of some others that might affect you in your area and how can we help you with some adaptations or retrofitting. We recognise, because of your geography, demography or whatever, that you are disproportionately affected by the increasing prevalence of climate change”. Is that a door that we could push on?

Definitely, yes. We have done quite a bit of work on timely moments of change, and I know Lorraine has as well. I would be happy to forward you some reports on that. When we define a timely moment that is ripe for intervening and trying to encourage people to adopt green behaviours, it can be something endogenous to their lives. It can be, “I have moved home”, “I have a new job”, “I have had a baby”, et cetera, which perhaps triggers a disruption of established habits and norms. There is a brief moment of opportunity where people might be thinking afresh about their decisions or you can encourage them to think afresh about their lifestyles and so on. It could equally be an exogenous shock, such as a flood or some kind of event, that heightens awareness on a particular issue. We talked earlier about COP26 perhaps not being fully leveraged as much as it could have been to create a moment of national conversation around what people can do in their own lives. These are all good examples.

Your first set of examples are individualised and completely randomised and dispersed. The second set are geographically larger groups of people. In one moment, you can hit thousands of people who are all agreeing with each other. If you needed to retrofit, they all live in one space in similar types of homes and so on.

Yes.

I agree definitely with the principle. Our research shows that being affected by climate change does not necessarily make you more open to mitigating climate change, but it might make you much more open to adapting to the impacts. Using those timely moments to encourage people to adapt to climate change definitely makes sense. It might be more of a stretch to expect people necessarily to buy into mitigation during those times. We might need to be looking for different moments of change that resonate more with, say, retrofitting. It could be moving house or something. In principle, yes, but the mitigation and adaptation link is not very strong.

Just to give you a little concrete example, we did some work in Portland encouraging people to take up a cycle share scheme. We found that people who had just moved home were four times as likely to take up the scheme when encouraged than people who already lived in the area. This is in response to a very low-cost leaflet campaign. They essentially get a 400% boost on effectiveness for free, just by targeting people at the right moment. There is no additional cost to doing that. It makes a big difference.

Thank you, panel. I am interested in trying to assess whether today’s energy, transport and other everyday systems are still defaulting households to higher-carbon choices, even if they wish to change. What is that going to do for the delivery of carbon budget 7? I am aiming this mostly at Professor Whitmarsh.

I am delighted that you are asking this question about defaults and the wider systems because we know that fundamentally it is these systems that are shaping people’s choices. With defaults in particular, we know that basically people will tend to go with the default. It is the easy option. One of my favourite studies is a study that was done with about a 250,000 Swiss energy consumers. They looked at what proportion choose to opt in to have a green energy tariff. It was about 3%. When they were moved by default on to the green energy tariff, about 90% stuck with that for at least four years even though it was costing them a little bit more to have that green energy. From 3% to 90% is an enormous effect of that default. We see this in lots of other areas, such as with food choices, the availability of plant-based food and so on. People tend to choose what is available, what is easy and particularly what is the default. It is hugely important. At the moment, the current systems are tending towards the default being the higher-carbon option for most people. We know this from lots of things such as the DESNZ attitude polling, which shows that people are doing and willing to do things that are essentially quite easy. Well over 80% of people are recycling and are happy to keep doing that. Toby has already mentioned this. The things that are really difficult are those things that are more impactful. People are much less willing to do those. Versus 87% who are recycling, only 41% are choosing to take public transport over driving, but that would be much more impactful. There are so many other examples. The up-front cost of heat pumps, of course, makes them less attractive than gas boilers. Electric vehicles are still more important. Flying is often much cheaper. There are endless examples of where the system is in favour of the higher-carbon option.

That is going to affect the ability of carbon budget 7 to deliver.

Yes, absolutely. To some extent, it is recognised in the advice from the CCC. They do talk about removing or reducing those up-front costs. They recognise the importance of changing these systemic barriers, but at the moment they are very much there and, yes, problematic.

Moving on, my next question is for Ms Cook and Mr Park. It follows on a little bit from Mr Park’s point about cyclists and people moving in. The seventh carbon budget assumes that there is a large modal shift away from cars. Certainly, I represent a rural constituency. The speculative development that we have seen is moving people into areas where any type of active travel is almost impossible and we have very poor rural public transport. With that thought in mind, how far do current town layouts and transport systems support the practice of modal change away from cars? I have slightly pre-empted my views on that, but I will let you contradict me, hopefully.

I suppose in Leeds we have a transport strategy where the strapline is something along the lines of, “The city where you do not need to have a car”. We have people, similar to yourself, who would say there are parts of the city where that is more challenging. Places such as Wetherby and others that are more outside do not have a train link. As a whole, there has been a lot of work done within the city to improve the connectivity of cycle infrastructure, but it has taken hundreds of millions of pounds to do what we have done in terms of the segregation of cycle infrastructure and starting that connectivity by making junctions better and making it more pedestrian-friendly. One of the challenges, again coming back to funding, is that there is not the sustainability of funding to allow the long-term vision and plan to say, “In 10 years’ time, this is what the city will look like”. We might know what we want it to look like, but we do not know whether we will have the funding to do it. Within Leeds, the big elephant in the room is always the tram. We do not have a tram system. We are the biggest city in Europe that does not have a tram system. There are barriers such as that. There is quite a reliance on national Government to support us. It is also about things such as the rail network. There are bits of our infrastructure where we have made massive improvements and it is certainly going in the right direction. What you also tend to find is that you can go into the city centre, but it is very difficult to go from east to west. You end up having to go into the city centre and back out, which, from a time perspective or if you need to pick up children or do something else, makes it very challenging. There is a lot of work going in the right direction, but there is a lot more work that still needs to be done.

It is probably easier in the city context than in the rural context that I was thinking of, where all those problems are multiplied by distance and fewer people.

This really gets to the heart of probably one of the most important points that we can convey to you today. Just echoing some of Lorraine’s points a moment ago, if there is one core lesson from applied behavioural science in the last 10 to 20 years on this topic, it is that our behaviour is shaped far more than we tend to realise by our environment, the context, what is easy, what is cheap and what is socially normalised, et cetera, than it is by solely our own individual sovereign agency and preference. Transport is almost the perfect example of that because it is literally a physical environment that imposes all sorts of constraints and incentives on our ability to make choices. Getting people out of cars is undoubtedly one of the tougher behavioural change challenges that we deal with in this space. It is a default to use the car in so many ways and it is worse in some places than in others. As you say, the rural-urban divide is very stark. It is realistic—I believe the CCC reflects this—that you just need a different rural-urban strategy. For urban, go big on public and active travel. For rural, go big on electrification. Inevitably, we are still going to be using cars much more. You could move away from that, but it becomes extraordinarily expensive. It is very hard to get people out of cars for a number of reasons. It is a personal habit and norm for many people. Once you own a car, the marginal cost is very cheap. There is the first-mile problem. We have probably all heard of the last-mile problem, but the first-mile problem is about what the first thing that you do is when you are starting a journey. Picking up your car keys from the counter, walking outside and getting in the car is dead easy compared to, say, walking 500 yards to a bus stop in the rain. It is also about the incentive structures within the place where you live. Public transport is often perceived as quite costly per journey, perhaps unreliable, and perhaps unsafe at certain times of day or in certain areas. It is not as private. It is not as comfortable or convenient, and so on. We are up against a lot when we want to get people out of cars. Really, what the evidence shows is that softer interventions such as communications and so on have very little effect. You need a combination of a very compelling carrot and a bit of a stick as well. The carrot might be, unfortunately, a lot of investment in much better and more reliable, affordable and convenient public transport and active travel systems. Even with that, if you are already used to using a car, that is still a tempting option, so you might also need to introduce some kind of road pricing or some disincentive on car use, such as restrictions on free parking at workplaces and that kind of thing. A combination of that can work, but, if we are going to be ambitious on modal shift, there is, unfortunately, no really easy, light-touch solution that I am aware of.

The seventh carbon budget really depends on this rapid scale-up of low-carbon heating, which you have talked about before. Ms Cook, aiming this question particularly at the knowledge that you will have on this, how far do installer availability, planning systems and uneven local authority capacity currently limit what can realistically be delivered, and how can that delivery be supported at a local level?

Just taking the different elements of that question, on the planning system, there was a big improvement last year in terms of the move to permitted development. That was a massive barrier, especially with the two-thirds of distressed boiler purchase planning not being realistic. That is a really big step forward. In terms of local authority capacity, it is interesting. What is a local authority’s role in it? To date, it has been where there has been grant funding or our social housing. Our social housing capacity is not an issue, because we are having to maintain and do that work anyway, so it is just a change. The grant funding is, again, not an issue, because we gear up to whatever grant funding is available. One thing that I would say, though, is that there are still some issues with the way that some of the grant funding is designed, so we are really pleased that we have seen longer, three-year settlements, but what we are still seeing are restrictions on every year, with capital that is not spent in year having to be handed back rather than allowing that ramp-up. There are still ways in which the schemes could be better designed. There is still not as much co-design happening with local authorities as there should be. A lot of things are just being handed to us as a fait accompli. You are losing some of the expertise, and also the opportunity to do more area-based schemes. When we talk about behaviour change, the best way of doing change is through area-based schemes, once you have seen what your neighbour has and they talk to you peer to peer. We have a really good example in Leeds of a Holbeck external wall insulation scheme. Landlords did not want it, but they saw what it had done to the property and the regeneration value, and then came forward. We have already talked about district heating, where people realised how easy it was, that it was warmer, and that the bills were cheaper. Area-based schemes have a really big role to play. Probably the biggest barriers are still quality, capacity and skills, especially when you see that ramp-up curve in terms of the carbon budget. With 450,000 a year by 2030, there has to be a really big shift in terms of the market at the moment, and also the quality of the market and some of the checks that go on, such as TrustMark. We are still seeing too many stories about rogue traders, and that really needs to be clamped down on. We have talked about there being too much negative press. The way to stop that is to make sure that we are getting quality installs. As a local authority, I would say that most of our installs are of a better quality because we put those checks in ourselves. We do those checks and balances and, if there are issues, we go back and correct it, so nobody is ever left with an issue. That is not true of what is happening across the country, and so that would be another real support.

It is something that local authorities can do but it is much more difficult for a private individual and, therefore, needs to be controlled centrally.

Mr Park, Professor Whitmarsh and Ms Cook, thank you very much indeed for the evidence that you have provided to us. It has been very thought-provoking and interesting. We will bring this first panel to a close.