Sunak rejects claims his net zero speech motivated by party politicsQ: Yesterday you said in the speech this was not about politics. But shortly afterwards CCHQ put out questions for Labour. This is all about politics, isn’t it?
Sunak does not accept that.
He says he did not want to take the easy way out.
He says supporters of these measures must explain why they are necessary.
Key events
Robinson quotes from Sunak’s resignation letter as chancellor, in which he said if something sounded too good to be true, it probably wasn’t true. Weren’t you doing that in the speech yesterday?
Sunak does not accept that. He says in his speech he accepted change was needed. He just want a “realistic approach”.
Sunak rejects claims his net zero speech motivated by party politicsQ: Yesterday you said in the speech this was not about politics. But shortly afterwards CCHQ put out questions for Labour. This is all about politics, isn’t it?
Sunak does not accept that.
He says he did not want to take the easy way out.
He says supporters of these measures must explain why they are necessary.
Q: You said you wanted to be honest. But you then said you were scrapping things that were not government policy. Where was the plan for a tax on meat?
Sunak says the Climate Change Committee talked about the need for an “accelerated shift” away from eating meat.
Robinson says that is not a tax on meat.
Q: And where was the policy for compulsory car sharing?
Sunak says the CCC talked about encouraging this. And it mentioned “demand side” measures, implying compulsion.
Q: And what about the requirement for people to have seven recycling bins.
Sunak says there were calls for more recycling, implying the need for seven bins.
Q: On boilers, you are saying it will be possible to install a new gas boiler up to 2035. So they could be operating up to 2050.
Sunak says a boiler typically lasts 15 years. And 2050 is the deadline for net zero.
He says people will have to make changes.
He says 2035 is a “sensible date”.
But he says he has also introduced exemptions for households where installing a heat pump does not make sense.
Q: Ford says you have undermined consistency.
Sunak says Ford made those comments before he made his speech. Since then, other car manufacturers have been more positive.
Q: Manufacturers say they won’t have an incentive to invest.
Sunak says he does not accept that, because the targets are in line with most other major countries.
Sunak says people who disagree with him must explain why they want families to have to pay an extra £5,000, £10,000 or £15,000.
Q: No one is suggesting people will have to spend that money now.
Sunak says there were polices in place (on boilers) kicking in in just two years.
Sunak says he is confident government has policies in place to meet its climate targetsQ: People will be surprised by you saying you are not slowing down. Alok Sharma is at the UN. He was the Cop26 president, and he says there is consternation at the UN about your speech. You will encourage other countries to slow down.
Sunak says, at the G20, he made the biggest ever UK contribution to help the poorest countries to transition.
He says the UK target for decarbonisation by 2030 is 68%. He says other countries have lower targets. These are the facts that count.
Q: But people are concerned about where were are going.
Sunak says these are targets for 2030.
Q: The climate change committee monitors if the government can meet its target, and it says the UK does not have the policies in place to meet its targets.
He says the secretary of state is legally bound to ensure policies are in place to meet these targets.
Q: The CCC says you don’t.
Sunak says he is confident in his position. And he says the government has “consistently overdelivered” in meeting its climate target.
The cost of new technology is coming down. And take-up of green technologies is increasing.
Nick Robinson is interview Rishi Sunak in No 10, in the Thatcher Room.
Robinson starts by recalling Margaret Thatcher going to the UN to warn against climate change.
Q: But you have not gone to the UN this year, and you are slowing down measures on climate change?
Sunak says he is not slowing down the climate targets.
He says you cannot look at the events this summer and not think climate change is real.
But, as Thatcher would have said, it is not right to assert a goal without having a clear plan to get there, he says.
Last night Kwasi Kwarteng became the latest senior Tory to express concerns about Rishi Sunak’s speech. The former PM, Liz Truss, has strongly supported Sunak’s announcement, but Kwarteng, who was Truss’s chancellor (before he was sacked), told Newsnight that he thought it was sending out the wrong signal to investors. He said:
I was concerned about pushing out the date for ICEs phase out, the internal combustion engine.
Philip [Dunne, the Conservative chair of the environmental audit committee] mentioned the fact that there has been a huge take up for electric vehicles.
Of course there has, the target 2030 has really focused the minds of manufacturers. That is what is accelerating and driving a lot of the transition, a lot of the change. And my worry is that, if you push that out, you are sending the wrong signal.
As business secretary, I used to go to places all round the country, particularly in Sunderland in the north-east [where Nissan is based], and there was huge amounts of capital that was being deployed because they felt we had very strong and very ambitious targets and they wanted to get behind that movement.
And of course there is some concern in the party that if we relax those targets, we won’t crowd in the investment and it will be to the detriment of jobs and wealth creation.
Good morning. Politics is 98% moments of routine predictability (interesting to those of us who care about it, but not so much to others), and then perhaps 2% moments of eye-catching wow. Rishi Sunak’s speech yesterday, in which he aligned himself with the net zero sceptics, abandoned what had been a cross-party consensus, and earned himself rave reviews in the Tory papers, was in the latter category.
In his London Playbook briefing Dan Bloom says Sunak wakes up to “a political landscape shifted by his own hand”. But will it still look like that in a week’s time? And, crucially, with the polls, will it shift the dial?
Here is our overnight story.
Sunak’s move is being seen as an example of wedge politics. But wedge politics is about driving a wedge into the opposition (between what their supporters want, and what their leaders are willing to do). This wedge has hit the Conservative party, too.
At 8.10am Sunak is on the Today programme. I will be covering the interview live.
If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly.
I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too.
I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line; privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate); or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.