While Alan Whitehead welcomes the government’s Clean Growth Strategy (CGS), which sets ambitious decarbonisation targets and aims to protect energy-intensive industries, he says it has taken an “unconscionably long time” to release. This means that the United Kingdom is “still playing catch-up when it comes to the fourth and fifth carbon budgets.”
The CGS, published in October – almost a year later than initially planned – is replete with positive language. The Prime Minister writes in her foreword of the 165-page document: “Clean growth is not an option, but a duty we owe to the next generation, and economic growth has to go hand-in-hand with greater protection for our forests and beaches, clean air and places of outstanding natural beauty.” Whitehead suggests that this is really a smokescreen for the harsh realities of the strategy’s delay. “The point is that it doesn’t get us where we need to go. There’s a question mark still hanging around the government’s level of commitment.”
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