Speeches by Miliband.

“We will look at that.”

“I am not aware of the details of what you are talking about. My colleague Steve Reed is committed to this agenda. He is working on the important land use framework, which people have talked about year after year and will happen quite soon. That is important. I will speak for myself, Chair. I want this annual statement …”

“I take seriously working with business, civil society and people across parties. I will be honest with you. I am not sure this is the kind of thing you normally say at a Committee. I lost at the election in 2015, as some of you may remember. One reason I am still in politics is I care so much about this issue, but I do…”

“We have to be slightly careful. I am not sure. The headlines can sometimes tell a different story to the truth. I do not accept that characterisation. When you think about how we build offshore wind nature-positively, there are ways to do it. We are thinking about the funds that can make that happen, including the deve…”

“That is an important question. This sense of mission is shared across the Government. I will come to nature in a second because it is important. When you think about clean energy and economic growth or net zero more broadly and economic growth, speeding up the building of our clean energy infrastructure is important an…”

“You, too. I pay tribute to both of you for the important initiative. I felt on coming to office that we have all this information in my Department about the climate crisis and DEFRA has a huge amount of information about the nature crisis, but we do not tell the country about it. The Met Office issues a report on clima…”

“In the interests of engagement and learning from this Committee, I am interested in your advice and thoughts on this. I will tell you my thinking. I want to pay tribute to Roz Savage and her co-sponsors for the work she did. One co-sponsor is in the room.”

“Lee wants to come in, but it is interesting. This may not be as widely known as it might be, but there are what we call effort shares for each sector. It is by sector rather than Department, for obvious reasons of interactions. This is an inheritance from the last Government. That is quite an important guide for Secret…”

“That question has two parts. On the first, it is very much part of the spending review process. I know from talking to the key Secretaries of State, and indeed working with Rachel Reeves and Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary, that we want this to be a mission-oriented spending review and that the missions get important…”

“I am convinced that we can do it. It is important to net zero, but I am convinced we can do it. Maybe we will come on to this. We have to do clean power by 2030 and we have to do lots of other things as well to deliver our carbon budgets. It is interesting that electricity demand will only grow, something like 50% by 2…”

“Yes. I am absolutely convinced of that. We set a deliberately stretching target. It is partly based on my experience. It goes back to some of the conversations we had earlier. Setting a target a long way away does not exactly increase the pressure to deliver. This has a massive virtue because it is driving progress thr…”

“They are right that it is hard. It is hard. It is interesting that when we came to office, there was no plan for clean power, never mind by 2030, by 2050. We are taking a different approach. To be brief on this, we are setting out how much of each power source we need, which is set out in the clean power action plan. T…”

“Yes.”

“No. The truth is it is moving at speed. That is what we have tried to do since we came to office: lifting the onshore wind ban, consenting all the solar, the renewables auction, the clean power action plan. All those are about speeding this up. It is interesting, in contrast to Cornwall Insight, that two years ago indu…”

“We run both limbs of the mission out of our Department. I want to be absolutely clear in case it is not clear that that is absolutely the case. It is also the case—and I know you understand this—that we rely on working with lots of other parts of Government. I will be frank with you. We are co-operating fantastically. …”

“The danger is less duplication and more silos. The clean power Mission Control is good because it brings together all the work in my Department that is relevant to clean power. Then we are also well served by the mission boards. I chair the mission board for our mission. The deputy chair is the Chancellor of the Duchy …”

“I am responsible for delivering clean power by 2030. I lead the mission. It is the first limb of the five missions of the Prime Minister. I am accountable to him for delivering this. Within our Department, we have set up an important body, Mission Control, led by Chris Stark, who was chief executive of the Climate Chan…”

“You do value brevity but let me be not so brief. The NESO, the National Energy System Operator, provided us independent advice saying that it is really hard. Of course the 2030 clean power is hard. If it was easy, the last Government might have done it. It is hard and it is challenging but it is doable and it is absolu…”

“Let me be a bit more expansive than that.”

“No.”