Welcoming the new Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee

The UK has announced that it will ratify the United Nations Paris climate deal before the end of 2016, striving to maintain its international reputation on climate change. This is great news and will be vital to putting the UK and the world on a course that avoids some of the worst risks of climate change to wildlife. Just last week the Committee on Climate Change concluded that meeting the Paris ambition of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees will need renewed efforts from the UK Government that put us on course to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

If you too were pleased to see these announcements you might also be worried by the recent news that the Energy and Climate Change (ECC) Select Committee folded at the start of this week. Could this risk undermining this role of international leadership and how well the UK will do in terms of driving a net zero economy by 2050?

Cross-parliamentary committees such as ECC provide crucial scrutiny of the Westminster Government’s policies and decisions and provide important platforms for stakeholders such as NGOs to be heard through written or oral evidence.

They also challenge Government in areas where it could do better and provide useful recommendations on proactive or remedial action. Take the recent report from the ECC Committee explaining that the UK is on course to meet its renewable electricity targets but severely off course on renewable heat and transport.

At a time when the UK looks set to miss these targets, and when there are shortfalls in policies to deliver the fourth and fifth carbon budgets (according to the independent Committee on Climate Change) scrutiny of the Government’s energy and climate agenda is a critical role the new Committee can play.

The pressure is on for Government to take action but any lack of scrutiny could lead to perverse outcomes and decisions that are inefficient, cost more in the long term, put the natural environment at risk and fail to deliver sufficient emissions reductions.

The Committee will be merged with the existing Business, Innovation and Skills Committee to form a new Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. This reflects the new Departmental Government structure in Westminster since the Department of Energy and Climate Change was abolished earlier this Summer and energy and climate policy merged with the pre-existing Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

A more general Committee could provide the opportunity for MPs to scrutinise where the Government could take more opportunities to dovetail low-carbon with wider industrial policies. But it could also lead to fewer inquiries on energy and climate change issues and reduce the expertise in Parliament on such issues. A sub-committee on energy and climate change would be a welcome element.

We hope that we can continue to work positively with Select Committees and that the amount of time and scrutiny spent on examining Government’s track record on energy and climate change will remain the same or even increase.

One of the first orders of business for a new Committee or sub-Committee could be looking at how Government could better align industrial and low-carbon strategy to meet future carbon budgets in harmony with nature. They may find our recent Energy Vision report on this very topic interesting reading.

So my boss Martin Harper has written to the Chair of the new Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, Iain Wright MP, to welcome him to his new role and to set out what we think some of the key challenges and questions for the new Committee could be.