Net zero is a national mission, not just a party slogan.
This is what Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director of the Grantham Research institute told us in this week’s episode of the Net Hero Podcast.
Bob told us that Labour’s lack of commitment to increasing public and private investment will mean that it will fail to meet targets.
He said: ‘The secret to achieving net zero targets is investments by both the public and private sector.
‘We have to keep in mind that our economic performance has been sluggish. Our analysis shows that we are about three percentage points lower than the average in the G7.
‘We recommended that the Labour government come in with the commitment to increase investment by three percentage points of GDP. Unfortunately, Labour dropped its commitment and has come up with a much less ambitious target. And this will make it harder for us to reach our net zero targets.
‘The last government spent £78 billion on subsidising consumers because of natural gas spikes. If we are dependent on fossil fuel imports, we are vulnerable to spikes caused by war, for example.
‘What we need to do is grow the economy. We need to borrow to invest in creating growth but we currently have restrictions that prevent borrowing to invest. This doesn’t make sense and it also doesn’t make sense to borrow to protect ourselves against high natural gas prices.
‘So the government needs to introduce a whole range of policies which allows investment.’
Bob said that Labour needs to learn from the mistakes of the previous government and more proactively focus on efficiently using energy.
He said: ‘Part of our problem is that we pay a lot of money for electricity and gas that we get no benefit from because of how much is wasted.
‘The last government had a few goals and they failed because of how they went about with it. They were set on the idea that the market would fix everything and they didn’t want to intervene.
‘What we will need is to establish a more proactive state in helping to create a rapid rollout of these technologies but doing it in partnership with the private sector.
‘The government will have to back up the private sector with a system and with a funding arrangement.
‘We need a much greater sense of the direction that the government is going in. It cannot just say that the private sector will work it out, it needs to provide clear direction.
‘We have such a massive task on our hands that we have to do it in the spirit of a national mission with urgency and at scale. It cannot just be a few voluntary schemes that you can apply to if you feel like it.’
Watch the full episode below.
