The Climate and Nature Bill: What happened

Last Friday (24 January) the House of Commons met to debate giving the Climate and Nature Bill a second reading, ultimately declining to do so. Both the Bill and the debate were subjects of considerable controversy, some of it more knowledgeable than others. 

The Bill, brought by Dr Roz Savage MP (LD, South Cotswolds) and promoted by a vast coalition of green NGOs under the banner of “Zero Hour”, sought by various means to increase the pace of decarbonisation and the restoration of nature. While laudable goals, the problem lies in the way the Bill seeks to implement them. 

Less well-informed online commentary speculated that the Bill would empower the Secretary of State to seize farmers’ land and turn it over for rewilding. While the government’s recent decisions on inheritance tax may make this suggestion appear less outlandish than it might be in more normal times, it was, nevertheless, incorrect.  

What the Bill does is to oblige the Net Zero Secretary to finalise and implement a climate and nature plan sufficient to meet various stringent goals, drawn up on advice from a citizens’ assembly. Any measures in pursuit of such a plan would have to be taken under legal powers the government either already has or would need to legislate separately to grant itself. An Act of Parliament cannot simply set the government an objective and empower it to do whatever it wishes to accomplish it: that is not how the rule of law works. In any case, direct land seizures or stringent directions on its use would seem readily challengeable as a breach of human rights law.  

While that attack was ill-founded, there was much else in the Bill to cause concerns. These were ably set out during the debate by Andrew Bowie MP (Con, West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) in his capacity as Shadow Energy Minister. He pointed out that the involvement of a so-called “citizens’ assembly” would hand responsibility for policymaking from an elected body – the House of Commons – to an unelected one, and that it would risk ever-higher energy prices and taxation, job losses and the substitution of imports for domestic production. 

Most damningly, he highlighted the Bill’s requirement that the UK should completely cease the exploration, extraction and even import of fossil fuels as soon as possible. That timeframe is admittedly vague, but there would be a requirement to set annual targets and take “all reasonable steps” to achieve them. As Mr Bowie pointed out, “[e]ven the Climate Change Committee has said that oil and gas will remain a crucial part of our energy mix for decades to come”. It is also not remotely clear where this language would leave the petrochemicals sector and the exploitation of hydrocarbons that could be used as fossil fuels, but might equally be processed into the plastics, fertilisers and medicines that are cornerstones of modern society. 

We learned, several days before the debate, that the government did not plan to back the Bill and unusually for a Private Members’ Friday had imposed a three-line whip requiring Labour MPs to attend. Apparently, the whips were prepared to vote the Bill down, a result party managers clearly hoped to avoid so that MPs would not be left subject to awkward questions from environmental activists about why they voted against protecting the climate and saving nature. 

They succeeded. According to Carla Denyer MP (Green, Bristol Central), Dr Savage had: 

“agreed not to push it to a vote today, in exchange, it seems, for just a meeting with the Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero and a video, with an agreement to work together but with no specific commitments.”

Thus, when the House divided shortly before two o’clock, it was not on a motion that the Bill be read a second time, but that the debate be adjourned. That motion was carried by 120 votes to 7, with neither Dr Savage nor her Liberal Democrat allies opposing it. Formally speaking that means the debate could be resumed on a given date in July, but because of the way the timetabling of Private Members Bills works on sitting Fridays, it will not be reached or debated that day. Essentially, the Bill is dead, at least for the time being. 

The Countryside Alliance elected not to brief MPs on this Bill because it was not published until the day before the debate and in any case, we knew by then that it lacked government support and so some means would be found to block it. If we had, we would have said that while we support decarbonisation and nature restoration, plans for achieving these aims must be both viable and capable of maintaining public support, particularly from rural communities. This Bill was neither. The government was right to ensure that the Bill would not make further progress.