Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, has made a dramatic intervention at the High Court in support of a legal challenge that accuses the government of breaching the Climate Change Act.

Lord Deben provided a witness statement in support of Friends of the Earth’s case against the government’s decarbonisation plan, which is currently before the court.

The case is one of three separate, but related, challenges being considered by the High Court this week.

The challenges, also involving ClientEarth and the Good Law Project, all allege the government’s Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP) is insufficiently detailed and risks the UK missing its legally-binding targets for reducing emissions.

The CBDP was published in March 2023. This followed a previous High Court ruling that an earlier version was inadequate and must be revised.

The three organisations alleged the updated plan was still inadequate and began fresh legal actions to force the government to provide more details on how emissions targets would be met.

Friends of the Earth’s case centres on an assumption by government that “everything will go right” and fails to account sufficiently for risks of under-delivery.

The opening of the case yesterday focussed on a document produced by officials at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), but not shared with the Secretary of State. The document revealed that nearly half the policies were listed as having “very low” or “low” degree of confidence that they would deliver the expected results.

In his witness statement, Lord Deben accused the government of failing to share information on the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan before publication with its statutory advisor, the Climate Change Committee (CCC).

He said:

“in my experience, the government has previously given the CCC advance information about reports published under the CCA 2008”.

He was also surprised that the Secretary of State had not been given risk assessments carried out by DEFRA, which rated policies red, amber or green based on the level of risk.

Had the Secretary of State seen how many of the polices were rated red or amber they would not have concluded the policies would meet statutory emissions targets, Lord Deben said.

He added that that when the CCC had studied the full detail of the CBDP it was “even more unconvinced that the government’s programme would achieve net zero by 2050”.

Lord Deben said:

“The government is relying on everything going to plan with no delays or unforeseen circumstances, and on technologies which have either not been tested or indeed on which testing has not even started.

“From what I have seen of the evidence provided to the court, the Secretary of State was not given enough detail on the level of risk associated with the policies in the plan. This meant that he could not see how many of them were likely to fail to achieve their end.

“When you see that evidence, to me it’s clear that the present programme does not provide the necessary assurance that we can meet our statutory duty to reach net zero by 2050. I know of no other government policy which is premised on everything going exactly right.”

Friends of the Earth lawyer, Katie de Kauwe, said:

“Lord Deben’s written statement is a damning indictment of the government’s latest climate strategy and its failure to properly consider the risk of its policies not achieving the emissions cuts needed to meet its climate targets.

“It’s a sorry state of affairs that the government departed from established ways of working to deny its own expert statutory advisors, the Climate Change Committee, the opportunity to view and offer comments on its draft climate plan before it was finalised and published. From an accountability perspective, it’s interesting that this has happened in the context of a plan which is so manifestly weak.”  

Responding to the legal actions, the government said the UK had halved its greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 while growing the economy by almost 80 per cent, delivering steeper emissions reductions than other G20 nation.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said in a statement:

“The government has overdelivered on every Carbon Budget to date and we’re on track to meet our future targets, which are among the most ambitious in the world

“While we cannot comment further on matters that are subject to live litigation, our long-term plans to deliver net zero in a pragmatic way will continue to lower energy bills, create jobs across the UK and reduce emissions.”

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