UK ministers have been ordered to produce an updated, more detailed, climate strategy following a court ruling that current plans lack sufficient detail for how the UK’s net zero target is to be met.
According to the judgement, following a court case on 18 July, the Secretary of State is required to lay a report before Parliament setting out proposals and policies for meeting the carbon budgets up to and including the new carbon budget, as soon as reasonably practicable after a carbon budget is set (in this case CB6).
The court decided that a new report, under section 14, is important not only to enable Parliament to scrutinise the Secretary of State’s policies and to hold him to account, but also to provide transparency so that the public can properly understand how the Government intends to meet the statutory targets.
The report, to be published by March 2023, must also cover other matters such as the timescales over which those policies are expected to take effect and how they affect different sectors of the economy.
The case was brought before the court by campaign groups, including Friends of the Earth, the Good Law Project and environmental campaigner Jo Wheatley.
They had shown that, taking the policies together, the net zero strategy would only achieve 95% of the required emissions reductions, leaving a 5% shortfall.
The claimants submitted that there ought to be included in a new report, and hence in the Net Zero Strategy, a numeric explanation for the Secretary of State’s conclusion that the policies will enable the carbon budgets to be met and a “numeric explanation of the extent to which those policies individually and in combination are expected to achieve that objective”.
Other groups, including a House of Lords committee, had previously warned that the government’s plans to achieve its 2050 net zero target are insufficiently detailed, with lack of clarity over how the target will be met.