One of the key debates at this year’s autumn conference will be on the party’s new climate policy paper, For People, For Planet – on Sunday afternoon, kicking off at 3.15pm.
In the six years since we last published a comprehensive climate policy paper (Tackling the Climate Emergency, 2019) much has changed. With record-breaking temperatures, wildfires, floods and droughts, the threat posed by uncontrolled global heating is becoming ever-more obvious. In the UK, however, at least we now have a government that takes the issue seriously, unlike Boris Johnson’s (which paid lip service to the challenge but didn’t achieve much) or Rishi Sunak’s (which became actively hostile). Yet Labour’s approach is still not good enough – in supporting airport expansion, for example, or in failing to understand the linkages between the climate and nature emergencies, or in being too slow to undo the damage caused by Brexit.
The Liberal Democrat approach is different. For People, For Planet is based on three key themes. First, putting people first: the measures needed to address the climate, nature and resilience challenges must be equitable, fair and affordable. This includes lowering electricity costs and offering support to all households for investments such as insulation and heat pumps; assisting low-income households with a social electricity tariff and targeted free home energy improvements; creating a Just Transition Commission to develop just transition plans and provide funding support for vulnerable communities; and developing policies in partnership with those they affect, including citizen input through a National Climate Assembly, and local engagement.
Second, tackling the climate and nature emergencies equally, rather than pitting one against the other. We would reform the machinery of government to create a clear voice and leadership on climate, nature and resilience policy, including appointing a cabinet-level Chief Secretary for Sustainability in the Treasury; and decentralise powers and resources to local councils, including establishing a statutory duty to develop Climate, Nature and Resilience strategies. We would place far greater priority than recent governments on adaptation measures to protect communities against flooding, wildfires and heat stress.
Third, leading on the world stage. We would build a much stronger relationship with the EU, organise international coalitions of willing countries to work on global goals and targeted activities, use trade policy to prioritise low-carbon goods, and increase development assistance for climate action. With its world-leading research facilities, the UK has a major role to play in developing technologies that can reduce the costs and challenges of decarbonisation globally.
The paper covers a very wide range of policy areas – because climate change affects many areas of government policy – and is full of detailed proposals. Much of what we included in our 2019 paper is still relevant, but obviously we’ve updated it to reflect different targets and timelines. Four changes from our previous position are worth highlighting –
We’ve included a completely new chapter on adaptation to the impacts of climate change, an increasingly urgent priority. One of the amendments to the motion that FCC selected for debate adds further detail on this topic.
Improving the energy efficiency of buildings – mainly through insulation – is still a high priority, but it’s now clearer than it was when we wrote the last paper that for houses with solid rather than cavity walls – broadly, those built before the 1930s – the cost can be excessive. So we are replacing our target of insulating every house in the country with a target of either insulating them or switching their heating to electricity, though heat pumps or other technologies. As electricity generation is steadily decarbonised –the paper supports the target of 95 per cent decarbonisation by 2030 – this will reduce emissions for heating more cost-effectively than through insulation.
Correspondingly, we place a high priority on bringing down the price of electricity, not just for its impact on cost of living – though of course that’s important – but also to create greater incentives for people to switch to electric heating and electric vehicles. A heat pump is about four times as efficient in delivering heat as a gas boiler, but per unit of energy delivered, electricity is about four times as expensive, so uptake is proving far too slow. We didn’t have time to develop detailed proposals in the paper, so we were pleased to see an amendment coming in from the parliamentary party with concrete measures to reduce electricity prices.
Finally, party policy has almost always been opposed to the construction of new nuclear power stations, mainly on the grounds that they are an extremely expensive form of zero-carbon electricity. Recent advances in the technology behind small modular reactors (SMRs), whose components can be built in a factory and then assembled on-site, has the potential to change this. So the paper supports the roll-out of SMRs if they can provide a cost-effective and safe contribution to a decarbonised generation mix, but still opposes the construction of large stations. The third amendment selected for debate on Sunday disagrees with that position, and argues for the party to support all forms of new nuclear power. FPC will be opposing that, and I’m sure it will generate a lively debate!
* Duncan Brack is a member of the Federal Policy Committee and chaired the FPC’s working group that wrote Rebuilding Trade and Cooperation with Europe, passed by conference in spring 2022.
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12 Comments
Duncan, you say: ‘In the UK, however, at least we now have a government that takes the issue seriously’. Really!
Britain is committed to spending £30bn on Carbon capture – the get-out-of-jail-free card that does not actually work.
If we want to save ourselves from ever more dangerous weather there is no alternative to halting the production of carbon dioxide in the first place.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/sep/12/carbon-capture-the-get-out-of-jail-free-card-that-does-not-actually-work
The purpose of a system is what it does. CCS allows the fossil fuel producers and consumers to pretend that BAU will be just fine. So CCS does work. Just not for reducing atmospheric CO2
The other thing to remember is that so called “Carbon Capture and Storage” is a great mechanism for big fuel business to capture vast amounts of taxpayer money on technology that does not work.
Useful sources of info from Australia are https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T_zaQefSgV8 from Australian Green MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T_zaQefSgV8, and a hard hitting but funny one is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8.
Of course Keir Starmer would say giving the nearly £22 billion to Ed Milliband, which would could be used to build 10 major new hospitals or fix all of the potholes across the country and have some change to spare is great value for money as it keeps the token leftie ex party leader in his cabinet happy.
It seems we are hoping more green energy, perhaps boosted by SMRs, will provide enough cheap carbon-free electricity to get round the insulation problem – I have never believed insulating all pre-1950s houses is a feasible option. My 1950s house has cavities, but I’m nervous about filling them, in case it causes damp. And Duncan says, the cost of electricity currently makes heat pumps unappealing.
David Evans has provided interesting links about carbon capture, or should I say “depressing links” ? Presumably there must be some people who are not quite as cynical as those YouTube clips suggest, and are working on the assumption that if we keep looking there might be a technical breakthrough which would suddenly make it viable. It is going to be necessary at some point in the future to undo the damage done to the environment, rather than simply slow down the rate of adding to the damage, which is what we are doing at the moment (not very successfully).
Small Modular Reactors were once heralded as the answer we were looking for. Instead of the vast cost and timescale of building huge, traditional reactors (which have always cost £billions more than budgeted) we had the ability to knock them out pretty cheaply – and quickly – based on the fact that we’ve been making them for submarines for donkeys’ years. They could also be sited relatively close to where the demand was, minimising transmission costs. What has gone wrong ?
@Andy Daer
6 SMRs have been ordered from Rolls Royce and are being built.
John Waller – thanks, that’s reassuring. Let’s hope planning permission doesn’t take long.
There are a couple of areas we don’t seem to have covered. The balance of renewables is currently heavily skewed towards two technologies Wind and Solar. They are both great and in global terms, solar should probably be the biggest sector. Britain’s a bit different though. We have less sun in Winter than any other well populated country and our fuel demand is heavily weighted towards the summer. We need some long term storage technology such as hydrogen or ammonia. We also need short-term storage (like pump storage) to even out the daily cycle and medium term for the weeks the wind doesn’t blow.
The other area is sea power. Tidal barages, tidal lagoons, tidal flow turbines and ocean current turbines are all reliable and available in the UK. Wave power hasn’t worked yet but We clearly have plenty available if we can work out how to harvest it.
Heavily weighed towards the Winter.
Another criticism is that we target those emissions coming directly fom the UK. We should include the carbon footprint of our imports and exclude the much lower footprint of our exports.
Hi Andy,
There is a long known saying that the best way to make money is to find what is worrying government and then work out how to get as much money as possible from them for researching it.
As you say, “Presumably there must be some people who are not quite as cynical as those YouTube clips suggest, and are working on the assumption that if we keep looking there might be a technical breakthrough which would suddenly make it viable.” and you are absolutely right.
The problem is that some of them will simply keep looking for it as long as we keep giving them lots of money for looking.
A simple assessment of the wasteful absurdity of some ideas is clear in the fact that serious money is being spent on research on capturing carbon dioxide not from industrial processes where CO2 concentrations are usually 10% and above, but direct from from the air, where concentrations are less than 0.05%. The vast energy needed simply to pump the air through the extractor mechanism to extract such tiny levels of CO2 is clear to anyone.