Chair of UK’s climate change advisers says business wants environmental regulation, and calls for return to cross-party consensus on green agenda

Regulating companies on their environmental performance is not anti-business, the chairman of the government’s committee on climate change has said, but is what companies want as they seek clarity in making their investments.



Lord Deben, former Conservative environment minister and now chairman of the committee set up to be statutory advisors to ministers on how to meet the UK’s emissions targets, said that as a businessman, he and others wanted clear and fair regulation on green issues. This is in contrast with the view of the Chancellor, George Osborne, who has described green rules as a “burden” on the economy.

“It’s very important to understand that business wants proper regulation,” he told a meeting of the all-party parliamentary environment group on Wednesday.

But he said that successive governments had failed to recognise this. “This is not about a single political party but all political parties do not get this. I’ve been in business all my life. We in the business community need to bring this back to government, to make government understand.”

He said the role of government was to make the rules fair, and allow businesses to compete in a free market, by regulating for a level playing field. For instance, he said, “subsidies” for renewable energy were actually a means of taking into account the true costs of fossil fuels, on health and the environment, which fossil fuel companies do not have to pay.

“This is not a free market,” he insisted. “The market we happen to have is very significantly twisted.”

Deben also called for a return to cross-party consensus on environmental issues, particularly climate change. “Consensus is a crucial party of what we do on the environment and climate change. When people try to take control [of the green agenda] and slag off other parties, [that harms progress on the issue].”

He pointed to the Climate Change Act, under which the committee on climate change was set up to advise ministers on meeting greenhouse gas targets, as a key example of cross-party consensus. The Act was passed with support from all the main parties, and with only a handful of dissenting MPs.

He warned that the environment should not be seen as “something out there, outside us” but as an eco-system of which we are a part, and he called for an international perspective in which the UK should take on its “moral duty” to assist other countries in tackling the ravages of global warming.

“If we trade [with other countries] then we have a responsibility,” he told an audience of parliamentarians and businesses. “If we ask people to produce things, then we have a responsibility. That is the truth and we cannot avoid it.”

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With a crunch conference on climate change taking place late this year in Paris, such an international approach would be “crucial”, he said. “Why do governments fail to understand that the way to do this [cutting emissions and dealing with green issues] in the most cost-effective manner is to do it now? They need to set the example, and stop saying “after you Claude”.”

Deben also defended the importance of environmental issues to any government agenda, instead of being overlooked. “Far from being at the edge of everything, this is at the centre of everything. I hope this government understands that.”

Huw Irranca-Davies, the Labour MP who is the incoming chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, one of the key select committees scrutinising the government’s green record, agreed: “This is a pro-business agenda.”

Nick Hurd, Conservative MP, said: “It’s been very important to have a cross-party consensus on this agenda, though you constantly need to test the boundaries. The next few years will be critical.”