Nick Timothy MP: Climate-Related Speeches In Parliament

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Nick Timothy's Speeches In Parliament Related to Climate

We've found 9 Parliamentary debates in which Nick Timothy has spoken about climate-related matters.

Here are the relevant sections of their speeches.

• 31 Mar 2025: Draft Ecodesign for Energy-Related Products and Energy Information (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) Re...

  18:45

  However, we offer a word of caution to Ministers. These regulations put a modest compliance cost on manufacturers that sell their goods in both Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but the Government are now considering aligning the whole of the UK with net zero laws written and decided in Brussels. We would be signing up not only to the European Union emissions trading scheme, with its significantly higher carbon price—increasing our carbon price has not been ruled out by Ministers in a succession of answers to our questions—but to a whole slew of regulations that will be enforced by the European Court of Justice.

  [Source]

• 18 Mar 2025: Electricity Grid Decarbonisation

  The Government’s rush to decarbonise the grid means more hidden costs, more curtailment payments, more balancing payments, more subsidies and a higher carbon price. Will the Minister guarantee that our carbon price will remain lower than the European price for the remainder of this Parliament?

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• 5 Mar 2025: Renewables Obligation Certificate Scheme

  15:02

  The phasing out of the renewables obligation and feed-in tariffs is being used by the Government in their efforts to hoodwink the public on the true costs of their net zero policies. The National Energy System Operator’s 2030 report made several highly questionable assumptions about how the Government’s goal of decarbonising the grid will cut energy bills. One of the points made by NESO was that energy bills would fall due to the expiration of the renewables obligation and feed-in tariff contracts, but those contracts will expire regardless of the speed of decarbonisation, so it is misleading to include that as a benefit of the Government’s deeply flawed clean energy plan. We will see costs increase significantly elsewhere, thanks to Government policies.

  It is absolutely our position that the Energy Secretary is trying to move too quickly. The plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030 is deemed by many experts to be unrealistic. It is predicated on a report produced by NESO, which itself says that the plan will lead to higher bills, and on calculations based on the carbon price increasing to £147 per tonne. It would be interesting to hear from the Minister whether the Government’s policy is to ensure that Britain’s carbon price should remain lower than the European carbon price for the duration of this Parliament, because the Secretary of State has so far refused to say that.

  As long as policy races ahead of technology, costs will inevitably increase for taxpayers and consumers, and that is before we even consider the consequences of the Climate Change Committee’s seventh carbon budget. The committee has recommended a limit on the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions of 535 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, which represents an 87% reduction by 2040 compared with 1990 levels. That is an ambitious goal, but it is one that the committee’s own data shows will come at a net cost of £319 billion over the next 15 years. If we are to debate this, the Government should be honest and open about that fact.

  No Government have ever rejected a carbon budget, and the Energy Secretary has so far refused to come to the House to make a statement on the publication of that budget, so perhaps the Minister can tell us whether the Government intend to accept the carbon budget in full. The Climate Change Committee believes that we will need a sixfold increase in offshore wind power, a doubling of onshore wind power and a fivefold increase in solar panels by 2040. To accelerate the growth of renewables at such a pace would require a huge increase in public subsidy.

  There are so many questions left unanswered, and so far only silence from the Energy Secretary. That is not because the Government do not understand the scale of the challenge they have set themselves. The Energy Secretary understands it all too well, but he will not admit publicly what his ideological attachment to net zero and his net zero policies mean for us all: nothing less than a revolution in how we live our lives, and the massive expansion of public spending for a system of energy that is less reliable and more expensive in generating power. We need complete clarity, so that the mistakes of the renewables obligation are not repeated. Failure to do so will leave us poorer and exposed to risk and instability in the world.

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• 26 Feb 2025: Family Businesses

  16:58

  This debate has been held against the absurd backdrop of a Chancellor of the Exchequer writing to Government colleagues and begging regulators, desperately seeking advice on how to find economic growth, while the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is deindustrialising the economy, the Home Office is welcoming fiscally negative immigration and the Department for Business and Trade is adding more than £5 billion a year in new costs to business in a single Act of Parliament. And the Government are whacking up taxes, including through the change to business property relief, because they broke their election promises as soon as they got into office.

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• 12 Feb 2025: Fuel Poverty: England

  10:34

  The challenge of fuel poverty affects people of all ages throughout the country. Rather than just creating new benefits and schemes to address the high cost of fuel, we need to resolve the root causes of energy costs more generally. Here, the Government are taking the country in a very worrying direction. The Energy Secretary promises to decarbonise the grid by 2030, and the Business Secretary wants to ban petrol and diesel cars by the same year. Tough standards on aviation fuel are being enforced; heat pumps are expected to replace gas boilers; expensive and intermittent renewable technologies funded by huge and hidden subsidies are favoured; and oil and gas fields in the North sea are abandoned, left for the Norwegians to profit from what we choose to ignore.

  The Energy Secretary has made much of the National Energy System Operator’s report on decarbonising the grid. He says that report shows that he can do so by 2030 without increasing bills, but in fact the report does not say that—and even then, its calculations rest on a carbon price that will rise to £147 per tonne of carbon dioxide. It is no wonder that, in reply to a question I asked him last week, the Energy Secretary would not rule out having a higher carbon price in Britain than in Europe. That will be terrible for families struggling with the cost of heating their home, but it will hurt them—and indeed all of us—in other ways. As long as policy runs faster than technology and other countries do not follow our lead on climate change, decarbonisation will inevitably mean deindustrialisation. That will mean a weaker economy with lower growth, fewer jobs, and less spending power to help those who we have been discussing today—those who need support the most.

  Of course, it is not just the NESO report that shows us the future consequences of the Government’s policies. The OBR says that environmental levies will reach up to £15 billion by the end of this Parliament to pay for net zero policies. As those levies will fall heavily on consumption, they will have a particularly regressive effect, as analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Cornwall Insight has confirmed. It is therefore no wonder that Labour’s election promise to cut bills by £300 by the end of the Parliament has vanished without trace, so I challenge the Minister today to do what she has not done since polling day—repeat that promise very clearly. I suspect she will not because, unlike the Secretary of State, she knows the reality of his policies. The Government are adding complexity and contradiction to our energy system and loading extra costs on to families across the country. There is still time for Ministers to think again and put the interests of decent, hard-working people ahead of the Energy Secretary’s ideological dogma.

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• 11 Feb 2025: Draft Energy Bill Relief Scheme and Energy Bills Discount Scheme (Amendment) Regulations 2024

  09:30

  As the current Government continue down the ideological decarbonisation route, led by the Secretary of State, we will watch carefully in order to protect the families and businesses who bear the cost of unrealistic clean energy targets. Indeed, experts expect the energy price cap to rise next month. The Manchester-based— not Aberdeen-based—head of GB Energy, Juergen Maier, says it will be

  We support the regulations. We recognise their role in winding down the old schemes, but we remain vigilant about new policies that will surely make lives harder and more expensive because of the unattainable and self-harming decarbonisation goals that the Government are pursuing.

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• 4 Feb 2025: Oral Answers to Questions

  The Government policy to decarbonise the grid by 2030 rests on the National Energy System Operator’s assumption of a £147 per tonne carbon price, but manufacturers are lining up to tell the Energy Secretary that it would destroy British industry. Will he guarantee today that for the remainder of this Parliament, we will have a lower carbon price than Europe?

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• 21 Oct 2024: Employment Rights Bill

  19:48

  Why will the Government do nothing about the international trading system? Countries aiming to run trade surpluses, such as China, hold down their labour costs and destroy industry in deficit countries such as ours. Trade wars, as two authors like to say, are class wars, and the Labour party usually likes to fight a class war, yet this Government want to flood Britain with cheap Chinese electric cars because of the Energy Secretary’s obsession with net zero. That is just one way in which our economic model needs to change, because while the Government’s characterisation of their inheritance is, I am afraid, cynical and wrong, there is a case for economic change, if only the Government were prepared to undertake it. I think the Business Secretary might be one of those capable of doing that, but I am not sure that some of his colleagues are. Today, Ministers could be launching a plan for reindustrialisation, for competitive energy prices, for domestic steel manufacturing and for a strategy taking in better infrastructure, skills and training, planning, regulatory reform and more— [ Interruption. ] Would the hon. Lady like to intervene?

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• 22 Jul 2024: Economy, Welfare and Public Services

  19:13

  We need to question economic theory, challenge Treasury orthodoxy and think beyond the intellectual limits of ideological liberalism. Theories like comparative advantage have led us to offshore industry and grow dependent on hostile states, like China. But international trade is neither free nor fair, and net zero cannot mean sacrificing our prosperity and security. Being a services superpower is a great advantage, but alone it is not enough. We need a serious strategy to reindustrialise, narrow the trade deficit and rebalance the economy. We need to change and, in the months and years ahead, I look forward to debating how we do so.

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See all Parliamentary Speeches Mentioning Climate