The Minister for Climate Change and Industry (Claire Perry)

The Government are today publishing the clean growth strategy—an ambitious strategy to cut emissions while keeping costs down for consumers, creating good jobs and growing the economy. This is an important component of our modern industrial strategy. We are also laying our responses to the Committee on Climate Change’s 2017 progress report to Parliament and publishing a suite of related documents.

We start from a position of strength. We have already made significant progress towards our legally binding 2050 target to reduce emissions by at least 80% against 1990 levels. We exceeded the target emissions reductions of our first carbon budget (2008 to 2012) by 1% of the budget level and we project that we will outperform against our second and third budgets covering the years 2013 to 2022 by almost 5% and 4% respectively.

The global transition to a low-carbon economy offers huge growth opportunities which the UK is well placed to take advantage of as a core element of our industrial strategy. Our low-carbon sector already employs over 230,000 people directly and another 200,000 through supply chains. Analysis for the Committee on Climate Change estimated that the low-carbon economy has the potential to grow 11% per year between 2015 and 2030—four times faster than the rest of the economy.

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