UK Trends and Developments Contributed by: Ruth Byrne KC, Andrea Stauber and Erin Vandzura, King & Spalding International LLP
the first months of coming into power, the new Labour government made a number of policy changes and announced significant plans to invest in and fast-track clean energy infrastruc- ture. Development of UK net zero policy On 27 June 2019, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) became responsible for ensuring that “the net UK carbon account” for 2050 was at least 100% lower than the baseline in 1990 (the “Net Zero Target”). In October 2021, under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the UK government published Net Zero Strategy: Build Back Greener (the “Net Zero Strategy”), which set out how the government planned to remove carbon from the power sector and end the UK’s contribution to climate change. Following the presentation of the Net Zero Strat- egy to the UK Parliament, environmental groups mounted a legal challenge, arguing that the Net Zero Strategy did not meet the required report- ing standards. On 18 July 2022, the English High Court delivered its judgment, in which it deter- mined that the Net Zero Strategy did not comply with the Climate Change Act 2008 and ordered that the strategy be refined and reissued by the end of March 2023. In this landmark judgment, the High Court declared that the UK government had breached its duty under Section 13 of the Climate Change Act 2008, which required the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero to adopt poli- cies tailored towards meeting carbon reduction targets. Serious doubt was cast as to whether the UK government’s policies could bring about the intended carbon reductions. The High Court found that the Secretary of State’s decisions were “irrational” in light of the available evidence,
which accounted for the “very low confidence” in achieving the UK’s 2030 international pledge to cut down carbon emissions. The UK government revised the Net Zero Strat- egy ‒ although this too was subjected to judicial review by some environmental groups in June 2023. In its judgment of 3 May 2024, the High Court upheld a majority of the grounds that environmental groups had advanced in holding that the UK government’s climate action plan breached the Climate Change Act. Net Zero Review In September 2022, former Prime Minister Liz Truss appointed the Conservative MP Chris Skidmore (the former energy minister respon- sible for signing the UK’s Net Zero Target into law) to lead a review of the UK government’s approach to delivering its Net Zero Target (the “Net Zero Review”). He was also tasked with identifying how the UK could meet its net zero commitments in an affordable and efficient manner – specifically, one that is “pro-business, pro-enterprise and pro-growth”. The Net Zero Review’s findings were published in its final report – Mission Zero: Independent Review of NetZero – on 13 January 2023. Per its final report, the Net Zero Review: • decisively concluded that “net zero is the economic opportunity of the 21st century”; • referred to McKinsey’s estimates that the supply of goods and services to enable the global net zero transition could be worth GBP1 trillion to UK businesses by 2030 and referred to government estimates that the transition could support 480,000 jobs in 2030; • concluded that new analysis conducted dur- ing the course of the review shows that the UK government’s Net Zero Strategy is still the
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