Following last year’s High Court ruling, the UK Government has published the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP), providing much greater transparency on its Net Zero plans. 

However, the Committee says its confidence in the UK meeting its goals from 2030 onwards is now markedly less than it was in its previous assessment a year ago. For the committee, "a key opportunity to push a faster pace of progress has been missed".

UK greenhouse gas emissions have so far fallen 46% from 1990 levels. At COP26, a stretching 2030 commitment was made to reduce them by 68%. This means that in only seven years, the recent rate of annual emissions reduction outside the electricity supply sector must quadruple.

The committee warns that time is now very short to achieve this change of pace. It identifies glimmers of the Net Zero transition in growing sales of new electric cars and the continued deployment of renewable capacity, but it find the scale up of action overall to be worryingly slow. 

In particular the report points out that while the Government proposes to scale-up the market for heat pump installations to 600,000 by 2028, the current rates are around one-ninth of this and are not increasing fast enough. In fact the report finds that installation rates of energy efficiency measures continue to be below necessary levels and fell further in 2022.

The report notes that heat pump installations rose in 2022, but the total number is still well-below the committee's pathway; its forecast figures to reach government targets. The UK installed 72,000 new heat pumps in 2022, 69,000 of which were installed in homes (approximately 40,000 retrofits and 29,000 in new homes). The CCC's balanced pathway projected 130,000 installations in 2022, rising to 145,000 in 2023. Meanwhile, the average cost of installing a heat pump in a home fell by 1.9% in 2022. This followed sharp rises in 2020 (10.3%) and 2021 (19.2%).

While unit costs for the heat pumps themselves fell by 6.7% in 2022, the cost of system components rose by 4.9%. The labour costs for installation only rose by 0.7%, although these had increased by 13.7% in 2020 and 17.8% in 2021.

One of the key messages in the report is therefore that the government should "stay firm on existing commitments and move to delivery". The report states that "the government has made a number of strong commitments, notably on the 2030 fossil fuel vehicle phase-out, the 2035 decarbonisation of the electricity system, the commitment to install 600,000 heat pumps per year by 2028, and the deployment at scale of new industries such as hydrogen and greenhouse gas removals. 

"These must be restated and moved as swiftly as possible towards delivery, including by ensuring the UK has the skills base it needs to deliver on its commitments and building on its promising plans to guide private sector action and investment."

In addition the report recommends that the government should dispell some of the current uncertainty buy "publicly affirming that electrical heat is the default option in all new buildings and existing properties off the gas grid; prohibiting connections to the gas grid for new buildings from 2025; setting out clear routes for other properties or areas where electrification or heat networks represent low-regret options; and clarifying the government’s position on the economy-wide priority of use-cases for hydrogen – in particular its potential to help manage peak demands for both heat and electricity, and its role in hybrid heating systems."

Lord Deben, Chairman of the Climate Change Committee, said: “The lesson of my ten years at the Climate Change Committee is that early action benefits the people of this country and helps us to meet the challenges of the coming decades more cheaply and more easily. 

"Yet, even in these times of extraordinary fossil fuel prices, government has been too slow to embrace cleaner, cheaper alternatives and too keen to support new production of coal, oil and gas. There is a worrying hesitancy by Ministers to lead the country to the next stage of Net Zero commitments.

“I urge the Government to regroup on Net Zero and commit to bolder delivery. This is a period when pace must be prioritised over perfection.”

Progress in reducing emissions - 2023 Report to Parliament