Whitehouse Communications convened a parliamentary panel event for the Committee on Climate Change to mark the tenth anniversary of the Climate Change Act 2008. The panel brought together Lord Deben, Chair of the Committee on Climate Change; Sir Edward Davey, former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change; Adam Vaughan, Energy Editor of the Guardian; Meryam Omi, Head of Sustainability and Responsible Investment Strategy at L&G Investment Management; and the Bishop of Salisbury, who leads on environmental affairs for the Church of England, to reflect on the Act’s successes and failures and to make recommendations for the government’s next decade of climate action.
The panellists’ recommendations were turned into a short report that was fed into cabinet and junior ministers at the energy and environment departments, adding further pressure on the government to accelerate carbon emission reductions in transport, industry, infrastructure and agriculture.
The challenge
The Committee on Climate Change is the UK’s independent advisory body on climate policy. The Climate Change Act 2008, on which the Committee was established, was a trailblazer, being one of the first pieces of legislation globally to set carbon emission targets into statute, and many other administrations around the world followed suit.
In 2018, the Committee on Climate Change tasked Whitehouse Communications with convening a panel of influential stakeholders from the environment and energy sectors to mark the tenth anniversary of the Climate Change Act. The occasion needed both to celebrate a decade of the Act’s operation and to serve a forward-looking purpose: whether the target set in 2008 was still the gold standard; whether the Government was doing enough to deliver a low carbon economy for the future; and what the Government could be doing to cement itself as a world leader in climate policy.
Our approach
Whitehouse Communications designed the panel event to combine the celebratory character of a landmark anniversary with the analytical rigour needed to make concrete recommendations for the next decade of UK climate policy.
The work focused on:
- Identifying the key questions the panel needed to address: whether the carbon emission target set in 2008 remained the gold standard; whether the Government was doing enough to deliver a low carbon economy for the future; and what the Government could be doing to cement itself as a world leader in the field.
- Convening a panel of five influential figures who between them covered a decade of climate policy leadership across politics, media, business and civil society: Lord Deben, Chair of the Committee on Climate Change; Sir Edward Davey, former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change; Adam Vaughan, Energy Editor of the Guardian; Meryam Omi, Head of Sustainability and Responsible Investment Strategy at L&G Investment Management; and the Bishop of Salisbury, who leads on environmental affairs for the Church of England.
- Capturing the panel’s recommendations in a short report designed to move from a celebratory occasion into concrete policy input.
- Feeding the report into cabinet and junior ministers at the energy and environment departments, ensuring the panel’s conclusions reached decision-makers with the standing to act on them.
The outcome
The panellists were unanimous in their conclusions that the UK was slipping on its current targets, and called for greater urgency from the Government in delivering carbon emission reductions in transport, industry, infrastructure and agriculture. The panel’s recommendations were captured in a short report that was fed into cabinet and junior ministers at the energy and environment departments, adding further pressure on the Government to press ahead with its stated ambitions on the low carbon economy.
For the Committee on Climate Change, the anniversary event marked a decade of the Climate Change Act’s global influence, and simultaneously turned the moment into a policy intervention aimed at the next decade of UK carbon reduction.
