£1 billion in North Sea Oil subsidies has been announced (Image: Andy Buchanan – WPA Pool/Getty)

It’s been an annus horribilis for the UK’s environmental efforts. A whole series of green policies have been cut or cancelled, shaking investor confidence in renewable schemes and taking the UK further off course for meeting its climate goals.

Below we summarise the main events of 2015 so far. For a full analysis, including why the UK could now face legal action, see British government could face lawsuit over climate failures.


19 March 2015: UK chancellor George Osborne announces £1 billion worth of subsidies for North Sea Oil, on top of a whole series of previous measures, including support for further exploration. Back in 2009, G20 countries including the UK pledged to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies.

16 June: The European Union says the UK is set to miss its EU target of generating 15 per cent of its energy (not just electricity) by renewable methods, despite being set one of the lowest targets of all EU countries.

18 June: New onshore wind farms will be excluded from a subsidy scheme from 1 April 2016, a year earlier than planned, the government announces. Onshore wind is the cheapest form of renewable energy.

Green Bank funding will be harder to come by (Image: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty)

25 June: The UK says it will sell off up to 70 per cent of its Green Bank, set up to lend money to risky green schemes such as wind farms that could raise cash elsewhere. The sell-off means it may no longer focus on risky green schemes, and most of the profits will not go to taxpayers. By contrast, a similar US scheme is set to make $5 billion profit for taxpayers on $30 billion-worth of loans. Companies it helped include Tesla Motors, which paid back its loan early.

30 June: The Committee on Climate Change warns that the UK is not on course to meet targets after 2020. Its recommendations include taking action to encourage long-term investment in low-carbon energy, such as by extending existing short-term schemes to a 10-year timescale.

8 July: Budget changes reduce the incentive to buy low-emission vehicles. Under the current system, the more CO 2 a car emits, the more the owner has to pay each year. But from April 2017, the tax will only be higher in the first year; in later years, it’s the same for all cars.

Plans to convert power stations to use biomass could see the UK facing legal action (Image: UniversalImagesGroup/Getty)

10 July: The zero carbon homes plan is scrapped. From 2016, all homes built in the UK were supposed to be carbon neutral. The idea was to achieve this by building energy-efficient homes and generating solar and wind energy on-site. The requirement, announced in 2006 by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, would have been the first of its kind in the world.

22 July: Plans to cut subsidies for solar power and for converting power plants to use biomass are announced. These changes may well be challenged in the courts.

23 July: The Green Deal plan to help people make homes more energy efficient is scrapped. The scheme was a flop, with very low take-up, but nearly a third of the UK’s emissions come from its housing, which is inefficiently heated and poorly insulated. This problem remains and there’s still no sign of an alternative policy.

4 September: The energy minister says nothing is being done to ensure coal use doesn’t rise again if prices drop. Ahead of the election earlier this year, the three main political parties all pledged to end the use of coal for power generation without carbon capture and storage.

Plans for tidal power schemes have been delayed (Image: Tidal Lagoon)

16 September: The UK drops out of the top 10 in a list of the best countries in which to invest in renewable energy. The UK had topped the Ernst & Young “Renewable energy country attractiveness index” in 2013. The EY report says: “A raft of policy revisions likely to dramatically slow deployment across a range of technologies have been rushed through (apparently on cost grounds), while a pro-nuclear, offshore wind and shale gas stance has left investors wondering what the UK Government is trying to achieve, and what evidence, if any, is being used to inform policy.”

22 September: The head of the Confederation of British Industry attacks the rollback of green policies, saying it is damaging investor confidence and the UK’s standing on the international stage.

29 September: The head of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, criticises the lack of action to tackle climate change. He warns it threatens financial stability in three ways: direct losses from climate-related events like floods, liability claims from parties who suffer these losses and also because the stock market value of fossil fuel companies will collapse if they are not allowed to extract all their reserves.

2 October: Plans to build £1 billion tidal power scheme in Wales are delayed by a year.

Read the climate change special report from this week’s issue.