Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 20TH - 26TH SEPTEMBER 2019 | 7 Interview F or someone who didn't leave the House of Lords until 2am, Lord Deben looks surprisingly fresh- faced when we meet later that morning. The Tory peer was in Parliament's upper house into the wee small hours supporting the ultimately success- ful legislation designed to prevent the UK exiting the EU at the end of next month without a deal. As a member of the rapidly diminishing breed of Europhile Tories, the 79-year-old peer is clearly delighted with how the previous night's events panned out. "Leaving the EU is a great mistake and the funda- mental reason is that it is to abjure the only way we are going to solve so many of our biggest problems, which is to work with our neighbours," he says. But we're not at the Georgian offices of Lord Deben's company SancroŠ, which advises on environmental issues, to talk about Brexit. Instead, we are here to discuss his work as chair of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which has chalked up some big wins over the past three months. The biggest of these was the government's accept- ance of its advisory body's recommendation that the UK should adopt a target of net zero emissions by 2050. Lord Deben is no fly-by-night environmentalist. He probably remains best remembered for the time when as secretary of state for agriculture, the yet to be ennobled John Selwyn Gummer fed his young daughter burgers on TV during the BSE crisis to demonstrate his faith that British beef was safe. But his time as a stalwart of the Conservative cabinets of the 1990s also included a four-year spell as secretary of state for the environment. AŠer being ejected from office at the 1997 general election, Gummer proved his commitment to tackling climate change by accompanying his replacement, Labour's John Prescott, to the climate change talks in Kyoto. Gummer leŠ the House of Commons in 2010 and entered the upper house. In 2012 he was invited by then prime minister David Cameron to become the CCC's second chair. While politics may be in turmoil, the ebullient Tory peer and Utility Week New Deal for Utilities panellist is "more confident" now than when he took on the job about the UK's commitment to tackling climate change. Having met ministers, he is "convinced" that they are determined to produce a net zero "package that works". "The government itself is clearly committed and indeed legislatively committed to meeting its [carbon] budgets, which means it will have to make serious changes. "If they don't, they will be taken to court and I will be witness for the prosecution, which would not be good for the government." The foundations of this optimism are the consensus, even on the traditionally climate change sceptic right wing of the Conservative party, about the importance of tackling the issue. Another straw in the wind was the overwhelming support for adopting the net zero target among the candidates for the Conservative party leadership. "They grasped we have to deal with the environment. They have grasped the reality of climate change." They included Boris Johnson, whom Lord Deben is prepared to give the benefit of the doubt on environmental issues. "In so far as the prime minister has consistently strong views, he has them on the environment. "His reaction to the fires in Brazil was stronger and tougher than it needed to be for his own purposes," he says, noting the track record of Johnson's father Stanley as a committed environmentalist. "I can genuinely say it doesn't matter to our programme on climate change who is in government, which I'm not sure was always true. The consensus is stronger today than it was. "The concern is not about commitment, that is now an all-party thing," says Lord Deben, adding that these days he is rarely questioned in public about whether climate change is happening. "The increasing understanding of people about climate change is very noticeable and the government has picked that up. It would be impossible now for a government to turn its back on what we are doing on climate change – not just because legislatively it can't, but because politically it can't. I'm not sure if that was true five years ago." Lord Deben, whose establishment credentials include a spell on the General Synod of the Church of England (although he converted to Catholicism in 1992), pays tribute to the radical end of the environmental movement for this change of mood on the issue. "The efforts of Greta Thunberg and the children and Extinction Rebellion are really valuable because what they have done is concentrate people's minds." Another factor is that the problem of climate change is becoming harder to sidestep, he says: "The thing about climate change is that every year it gets worse. We don't want it to be true but every year it becomes more obvious that it is happening." But the debate has shiŠed onto what is the most cost-effective way of curbing emissions.

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