The High Court has ruled for the second time in less than two years that the government’s plan to meet climate targets is unlawful.

A judgement, issued today, followed a legal challenge by Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and the Good Law Project in February 2024.

The government is now expected to have to draw up another revision to the plan within a year.

The three organisations had previously argued successfully that an earlier plan breached the Climate Change Act 2008.

The government was then ordered to make changes to that plan.

But the organisations argued that the revised strategy, the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP), published in March 2023, was still inadequate and in breach of the act.

In a ruling published this morning, Mr Justice Sheldon allowed four of the five grounds in their legal challenge.

He agreed with ClientEarth and Friends of the Earth that the Secretary of State was given “incomplete” information about the likelihood that proposed policies would achieve their intended emissions cuts. This breached section 13 of the Climate Change Act which requires the Secretary of State to adopt plans and proposals that she considers will enable upcoming carbon budgets to be delivered.

The judge also agreed with ClientEarth and Friends of the Earth that the plan’s central assumption that all its policies would achieve 100% of their intended emissions cuts was wrong. The judge said the Secretary of State had acted irrationally, and on the basis of an incorrect understanding of the facts.

He agreed with ClientEarth that the emissions savings relied on by the Secretary of State needed to be adjusted to reflect any expected shortfalls in savings due to risks and barriers to delivery. The quantified savings for each policy and proposal must represent what officials realistically expected to be achieved rather than just aspirational targets, he ruled.

He also agreed with Friends of the Earth that the government had breached its duty on sustainable development. This requires the Secretary of State to be satisfied that the policies adopted “must contribute to sustainable development”. The Secretary of State had applied a test of “likely” which the court held was a lower threshold than required under the CCA.

Mr Justice Sheldon said in his ruling that the Secretary of State made a decision on the revised plan “on the basis of a mistaken understanding of the true factual position”.

He said:

“The material in the draft CBDP that there would be over-delivery and under-delivery was vague and unquantified, and so did not provide the Secretary of State with sufficient information to make his own evaluation or assessment.”

He said:

“The failure to identify which, and by how much, individual proposals and policies were likely to miss their targets, meant that the Secretary of State could not work this out for himself.”

He rejected the final ground that the minister failed to include required information in the CBDP.

Reaction

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

“This is another embarrassing defeat for the government and its reckless and inadequate climate plans.

“It shows the strength of the Climate Change Act – brought into force after a successful campaign led by Friends of the Earth and the backing of an overwhelming majority of MPs – to hold the government of the day to account for meeting its legal requirements to cut emissions.

“We’ve all been badly let down by a government that’s failed, not once but twice, to deliver a climate plan that ensures both our legally binding national targets and our international commitment to cut emissions by over two thirds by 2030 are met.

“Cutting emissions isn’t only essential to avert the worst of climate breakdown, it will create long term jobs in green industries of the future, boost energy security, bring down our bills and end our reliance on costly fossil fuels.

“We urgently need a credible and lawful new action plan that puts our climate goals back on track and ensures we all benefit from a fair transition to a sustainable future. Meeting our domestic and international carbon reduction targets must be a top priority for whichever party wins the next general election.”

ClientEarth’s senior lawyer, Sam Hunter Jones, said:

“The courts have now told the UK government not once, but twice, that its climate strategy is not fit for purpose. This time the court made it emphatically clear: the government cannot just cross its fingers and hope for high-risk technologies and uncertain policies to plug the huge gaps in its plans.

“No more pie in the sky – this judgment means the government must now take credible action to address the climate crisis with a plan that can actually be trusted to deliver and with numbers that can be relied on.

“The good news is that with crisis comes opportunity. As its own expert advisors have repeatedly said, the government has a golden opportunity to reduce emissions with actions that will also create jobs, improve services and bring down household bills.

“Actions such as public transport investment and a home insulation roll-out will create new jobs, lower costs and provide energy security now and for generations to come – as well as putting us on track to meet our legal targets.” 

 Emma Dearnaley, legal director of Good Law Project, said:

“This is yet another climate failure from this government – it’s the second time in two years that its flagship net zero strategy has been found to be unlawful by the court because of our joint legal action.

“This builds upon our earlier success in the legal challenge, where we released key information that Ministers tried to keep under lock and key, revealing significant risks of their climate policies not meeting vital targets.

“This welcome ruling shows that the law is our best – and often last – line of defence against a government that is failing to act as it must to address the climate emergency. And we will continue to use it to push for accountability and greater ambition”.

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

“The UK can be hugely proud of its record on climate change. Not only are we the first major economy to reach halfway to net zero, we have also set out more detail than any other G20 country on how we will reach our ambitious carbon budgets.

“The claims in this case were largely about process and the judgment contains no criticism of the detailed plans we have in place. We do not believe a court case about process represents the best way of driving progress towards our shared goal of reaching net zero.”

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