PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
(21 November 2024)

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, what data his Department holds on (a) the annual costs incurred to date in implementing Net Zero policies and (b) the measurable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions achieved as a direct result of those policies.

Asked by:
Richard Tice (Reform UK)

The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) published its analysis of the cost of reaching net zero by 2050 in chapter 3 of the July 2021 edition of its UK Fiscal Risk Report. As the OBR has noted, “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero.”

The UK has halved its emissions, having cut them by around 53% between 1990 and 2023.

Each year the department publishes updated energy projections, analysing and projecting future energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in the UK. They take into account climate change policies where decisions on policy design and funding are sufficiently advanced to allow robust estimates of policy impacts to be made. These projections allow us to monitor progress towards meeting the UK’s carbon budgets.

The latest published projections can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-and-emissions-projections-2022-to-2040

Final estimates of UK greenhouse gas emissions are also published annually.

Answered by:
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1 January 1970