14: An interview with Greg Barker, coalition government climate change minister
Gregory Barker, now Lord Barker of Battle, was energy and climate change minister in the coalition government. He was pivotal to UK policies like the Green Deal, feed-in-tariff, & the Green Investment Bank. He reflects on his time in the role, and shares tips and advice for his successors
Essential Reading:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/apply-for-the-green-homes-grant-scheme
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/The-Green-Investment-Bank.pdf
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmenvaud/191/19106.htm#a9
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policy-design-of-the-uk-infrastructure-bank
https://www.greenfinanceinstitute.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/GREEN-FINANCE-INSIGHTS-PAPER.pdf
Episode Transcript
[Music flourish]
Matt: Hello, I’m Dr Matt Hannon.
Rebecca: Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford and welcome to Local Zero.
[Music flourish]
Matt: So shortly, we’ll be talking to someone who was central to the Coalition Government and who led on their flagship climate and energy policies, Lord Barker of Battle, formerly Greg Barker.
Rebecca: Lord Barker was Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change under the Coalition Government before receiving his peerage in 2017. He played a pivotal role in the design and implementation of various major green initiatives such as the Green Deal, the Feed-In Tariff and the Green Investment Bank.
Matt: While some of these were more successful than others, we want to unpack how those initiatives were developed, the role that local has played in these policies and, of course, what Lord Barker thinks are the key challenges and opportunities facing a net zero transition.
Rebecca: We’ll discuss a range of UK government community and local energy strategies and the current efforts to support retrofit and decarbonisation in various sectors along with the more recent and turbulent Green Homes Grant.
Matt: So as always, we want to hear from you. Please do tell us what you think of the podcast and ask questions or suggest topics for future episodes.
Rebecca: Absolutely. Reviews and suggestions are always, always welcome and you can also tweet us and for now, we are @EnergyREV_UK and use the hashtag #LocalZero.
[Music flourish]
Matt: But first, let us bring in our trusted steed... not a steed [laughter]. That’s the wrong term. Don’t ride you anywhere [laughter]. But first, let us bring in our trusted wingman, our producer and the man behind the scenes, Fraser Stewart. How are you, Fraser?
Fraser: I’m good, Matthew. How’s yourself?
Matt: Very well, yes. Becky joins us too. How are we?
Rebecca: Well, just watching the rain pour down outside the window but other than that, doing pretty well.
Matt: I love how these pods always begin with a comment on the weather which is both very British but also very fitting given that we’re recording this in Glasgow and it could quite literally be any kind of weather. We had snow about seven or eight days ago.
Fraser: Yeah, and it’s a week before it actually goes out and so for the listeners just now...
Matt: It was raining [laughter] at some point in the recent past.
Rebecca: Let’s be honest, it’s Glasgow. It probably still will be next week [laughter].
Matt: I’ve got my shorts on standby just in case. Today, we have a very special guest. We’ve got Lord Barker who is a former Minister of State for what was then the Department for Energy and Climate Change and now is BEIS (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, although that acronym would have also worked. We’re very pleased to have him aboard and he sits on an absolute mountain of experience about how to support new and exciting energy projects, many of which have been local. So I bet you’re both excited to have him aboard.
Rebecca: Absolutely. I think it’s going to be an absolute bumper discussion today, isn’t it? Hopefully, we’re going to get some real insights into some of the critical policies over the last decade that have helped to drive the community energy sector.
Fraser: Yeah, and I think for all three of us, he’s contributed at least in some way to the policies that we all study: the sectors that we’ve worked in and the research that we’ve done. It’s a big foundation for our work and work that a lot of people listening will have contributed to as well.
Matt: I’m really excited about having him along and I think the big reason is because Lord Barker took post in the early 2010s and it was really at that point that many of the big policies, that we know today, that have supported energy policies like the Feed-In Tariff, the Renewable Heat Incentive and other policies that have slipped by the wayside but made waves at the time like the Green Deal. Lord Barker oversaw all of these and he was around the table when these were being discussed and also the Green Investment Bank. So I’m really hoping we can dig in a bit more about those and why those decisions were made and how he felt they panned out.
Rebecca: Absolutely. I mean for me, this whole policy and political landscape can sometimes feel a little bit opaque at times. Whilst a lot of these policies have had very positive impacts... I mean just look at the Feed-In Tariff and the massive uptake of small-scale solar and other small-scale forms of generation that it saw. Absolutely brilliant and beyond what anyone would have expected at the time. Of course, some of the policies have been maybe less effective, either because they were stopped short for one reason or another or because maybe there were some unintended consequences. I think as we look forward to the coming... just shy of 30 years before we’ve got to start hitting our net zero targets, policies like these are going to be absolutely critical to get us there and get us on that journey.
Matt: I’m going to come to Fraser in a minute who has done some research on the Feed-In Tariff but just before we do, on the Feed-In Tariff, it was so successful that it was almost a victim of its own success in that they actually had to step down the level of subsidy and it was, in part, because solar and other renewable techs were getting cheaper. They did have to scale this back because the demand for this was just unforeseen. Fraser, you’ve done a bit of research looking at the distribution of these subsidies and just how equitable they were.
Fraser: Yeah, absolutely. For the enormous benefit that the Feed-In Tariff had, not just for household solar, community wind and all kinds of stuff around local and household-level energy, it was also susceptible to producing massive inequalities. Middle-class people, middle-income people and higher-income people could afford the time and the expense of actually making use of the Feed-In Tariff which, if you got on to in the early years of the Feed-In Tariff, was worth quite a lot of money. You’re locked into a generation tariff for a period of 20 years. You can make a lot of money on that. Like Becky mentioned earlier, there are some of these unintended consequences and while the Feed-In Tariff did a lot of good, moving forwards, do we have lessons beyond simply uptake and incentives that we need to think about? I think that’s especially pertinent as we talk more about a just transition going forward.
Rebecca: Absolutely. I mean this really opens up a question around what we mean by success. If we’re judging success purely around the uptake of renewables, then you just can’t argue that the Feed-In Tariff was successful and, as you say Matt, a victim of its own success. But I think as we start to deal with all of these different outcomes that we’re trying to achieve, we’re not just talking about the uptake of renewables and cutting carbon. We’re also talking about social equity and we’re talking about other outcomes like are we thinking about issues related to biodiversity? Are we thinking about issues related to cleaner air? What else are we also trying to achieve with these policies? I think that’s where this area starts to get so complicated around how these individual policies can work or can work together in tandem with other policies to really deliver against the multiple objectives we’re trying to meet.
Matt: I’m not convinced that those policies, in the 2010s, were really set against that backdrop, Becky. I mean at the time, they were talking about the Energy Trilemma. We were talking about emissions, affordability and security. Now Fraser and yourself have been pointing towards a just transition but also wider co-benefits like biodiversity, air quality and the kind of things that are really on the agenda now. These, by my understanding, were not really framed against those objectives. That didn’t mean they didn’t have a positive impact in that regard but I think the other thing to say about something like the Feed-In Tariff is that it was successful on two fronts. One, it was actually enabling individual households to bang a solar panel on their roof but it was also supporting local authorities and communities to set up neighbourhood-wide schemes to do this. I feel it showed a way forward for the sector as to what they could do if the money was there. The problem is the money isn’t there anymore. The scheme has now been curtailed and the Renewable Heat Incentive, similarly, next year. Sorry, Fraser, you wanted to jump in.
Fraser: In terms of the community side of things, that support is... and again, this relates to your research, Matt, there’s a massive black hole in support for those schemes going forward now in terms of how they’re going to get off the ground for the benefit that they’ve had. In terms of a modern application of this, the most recent incarnation in terms of the Green Homes Grant and the failures around that... I don’t know if you guys have had thoughts on this but I think it’s interesting the sort of calamity that was the Green Homes Grant compared to something like the Feed-In Tariff that was so successful. It almost felt like a legacy policy from the Feed-In Tariff. What do you think the reasons were for that? Why didn’t it work out in the same way?
Rebecca: Well, I think this just shows how many questions we have and how much we’ve got to talk about [laughter], so let’s get stuck into it and bring on our guest.
Matt: Absolutely, yeah. I’m looking forward to it.
[Music flourish]
Greg: Hello, I’m Greg Barker. I’m the Executive Chairman of the En+ Group which is the world’s largest producer of low-carbon aluminium and also the world’s largest private sector hydropower business.
[Music flourish]
To put that in context, the group that I lead generates more clean electricity from our hydropower assets than Britain does from all of its nuclear power stations put together. Put another way, the Hoover Dam generates about 2 gigawatts of electricity and we generate 16 gigawatts. So I’m very proud, at this point in the development of the global low-carbon economy, to be in a leadership role in a company that really is a key element of that effort. However, more germane to this podcast, from 2010 to 2014, I was the UK Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change in David Cameron’s Coalition Government. From 2014 to 2015, I served as Mr Cameron’s Climate Envoy. Prior to 2010, I was the Opposition Spokesman on Energy and Climate Change from 2005 through to 2010 and for the four years prior to that, I served on the Environmental Audit Committee. So I had the real privilege of actually working with a huge number of people, very talented and expert people, in that period of opposition when we really did start to think outside the box about how we could drive forward a climate-friendly energy agenda and what we needed to do to make good on the legislation that we had helped pass in the Climate Change Act a couple of years before coming into government.
Matt: Thank you and welcome, Lord Barker. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you along. That’s an excellent overview of your involvement in the policy landscape and, of course, you presided over some real landmark policy changes during that period, many of which we’ve felt the full repercussions of over the past decade. I just want to take a step back and for you to give your reflections on what you think are some of the greatest challenges facing a net zero transition and I guess to reflect upon whether you think these are the same challenges that you were grappling with when you first took office.
Greg: No, I think the challenges I faced when I took office were incredibly different. It’s difficult to think it was only ten years ago. It seems like a different lifetime almost. We need to recognise just how far we have come. The fact that we are nearly halfway to meeting that net zero goal is extraordinary. There’s been a 47% decrease in carbon emissions since 1992. Now when we passed that legislation and I was involved in tabling the amendment to the Climate Change Act that took it from 60% reduction to 80%, if we’re really honest, it was a massive leap of faith. We did it because we knew that was the right thing to do, not because we knew how to do it, and we really did put our trust in our ability to come up with new solutions. So to have made this progress now, and those are bigger cuts than any other major economy in the world, is extraordinary at a time when there has been growth in the economy. It’s a very different landscape. The other thing that’s very different is when I became Climate Change Minister, I was constantly and frequently still having arguments with people about whether or not climate change existed, whether or not it was actually something that we should be responding to as policymakers and whether or not the whole thing was a hoax or not. I think that was the case up until... I think the last time I did a BBC programme where I was up against a climate denier was probably 2016 or maybe even 2017. Now, you’d be laughed off the TV or laughed off the radio if you started to have that conversation but that was the context in which four years after, David Cameron and I had gone to the Arctic and pointed at melting icecaps and patted huskies, that was the reality of the debate around climate change and climate policy in 2010.
Matt: So if you were minister today, what would be in your in-tray in terms of the big challenges you’re going to have to tackle? You’ve made it very clear that times have changed and, in fact, some things have dramatically improved. What do you expect the current Minister of Energy and Climate Change will be tackling? What would be the primary issue?
Greg: In a way, we tackled the low-hanging fruit and the easier-to-address issues. The energy transition, although it didn’t seem easy at the time, has been a huge success. It’s not complete yet but we can see the finishing line. You don’t have to be a great visionary to anticipate a world in which we will get to a totally clean grid. However, while energy is the most important element in the decarbonisation of the economy, there are other big emitters of carbon that need to be tackled and those are harder I think. You’ve got the hard-to-abate industries that underpin our economy which require further technological change and very substantial investment in order to make that change. You’ve then got transport and you’ve got agriculture. I think it’s a more diffuse challenge that the government faces now and the built environment, of course. It’s a more diffuse challenge that they face and as such, there aren’t just the big wins that we were offered in the energy sector. If you look at what the Coalition Government did, particularly my department, DECC (Department of Energy and Climate Change) with the energy reforms of the early part of the last decade, this effectively created the offshore wind industry and more than anything, the rollout of offshore wind at such scale and so incredibly efficiently at such low prices. That’s been the biggest single game-changer I think for the UK energy sector.
Matt: Absolutely. So some of the issues, as you say, you were maybe getting on top of. You mentioned the built environment there which is obviously a huge emitter and I think we’ll dig into some of the questions in relation to the policies that you were involved with. Often, I characterise this as a game of two halves. As you said, the first of decarbonisation, there or thereabouts, we’re delivering. That was mostly about the power sector. The next half is about some of the sectors that you’ve mentioned around the built environment. These are much more consumer-based sectors and where we’re going to have to now rely on the consumer making some tough choices. Is this something that you grappled with during your tenure as a minister or did you feel you were able to deal primarily with big business and other key stakeholders rather than Mr and Mrs Jones at 22 Acacia Avenue?
Greg: If I’m honest, the answer for those consumer-facing issues really is they do require regulation. It does require a very concerted approach. You do need to work closely with the private sector because that’s where the innovation comes from. That’s where the great ideas come from that both create the products and also create the ideas that bring the consumer on board or at least bring the mass consumers on board. When I was a minister, I was constantly meeting some wonderful people who were, what you might call, the hard-core enthusiasts which are a surprisingly large number but they’re still a minority of the population. The challenge is not to continue to please the green consumer but about how you bring on board the sceptical or disinterested consumer. That’s where you need to work with business to make that happen.
Rebecca: I want to pick up on some of these different challenges that we’re talking about because we’re looking at different sectors. For me, a big element of this is that we don’t have a level playing field anymore. With the huge advances that have been made in the power sector, for a lot of people, that’s happened behind closed doors. So not only are we requiring people to make changes in their everyday lives and be, I guess, more conscious of some of the decisions that they’re taking but we’re also faced with an environment where some people are just more able to act than others, whether that’s because they’re in different financial circumstances, whether that’s because they own versus rent their and so on. How do you think the policy landscape might need to reflect this? So looking back at some of the policies that you implemented, do you think that the policies we need for the next stage or the second half, as we’re referring to it, need to do something a little bit differently?
Greg: Yes, absolutely. Firstly, across the board with climate change, you have to recognise... I mean I’m a Conservative politician and I still believe in liberal-conservative values but I also recognise that when it comes to climate change, there is clear market failure. The market provides opportunities to create solutions but left to its own devices, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will create those solutions in a way that is aligned to meeting the commitments that we know we’ve made to try and keep global warming below 20 and hopefully, 1.50. In order to marshal the private sector behind clear policy goals that have been agreed upon globally and are reflected in Paris and hopefully, will be reinforced in Glasgow, you need the government to step up and play a very strong role... thoughtfully and in a more sophisticated way than perhaps we’ve seen in the past. Nevertheless, there is a clear role for regulation. What’s a good example of that? A good example of that is what the government is doing in transport with electric vehicles and announcing, more than a decade ahead of time, that they will, nevertheless, call time on the internal combustion engine. That is very radical. It’s going to drive real change and it’s already driving massive investment and technology innovation in the transport sector across the board. That’s a really good example. Where is a bad example? I think it’s probably the reluctance that I certainly encountered and wasn’t able to get through in my time in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, a commensurate level of ambition in the rented housing sector. In fact, that’s not quite true. Some of rented housing is actually very good. For example, a lot of council-owned stock or housing association-owned stock, relatively speaking, is at quite high levels. The biggest problem is in owner-occupied housing. The house, when I was in government, that you found it hardest to reach with your policy tools was the five-bedroom or three-bedroom family house lived in by an elderly widow...
Rebecca: Oh, wow!
Greg: ...without a mortgage and untouched by finance. It was probably extremely cold and she couldn’t really afford to heat it. She didn’t want to move out, was very suspicious of government schemes and didn’t want to incur debt. It was very difficult to try and find the right tools that would engage those sorts of people.
Matt: On that, there’s a real suite of policies that you oversaw like the Feed-In Tariff, the Renewable Heat Incentive, the Green Deal and the Green Investment Bank. I could go on. Many of these were targeting some of the people you’ve just mentioned. You mentioned the rental sector and you then mentioned the owner-occupier sector. Some of these did encourage people. Earlier on, you mentioned bringing the consumers on board who may not otherwise have acted. So I think reflecting on some of these like the Feed-In Tariff but also the Renewable Heat Incentive and Green Deal, which policies are you most proud of and which do you maybe look back on with some sense of regret and why?
Greg: Firstly, the Feed-In Tariff. Basically, the decision that I made when I came in, very quickly, was to stretch it. I came in and there was a very high tariff but a finite pot of money from the Treasury or a finite budget from the Treasury. I very quickly realised that I was making a very small group of people doing very nicely and getting a very high return that was unwarranted. What I wanted to do was get the maximum possible deployment from the pot of money that I had available, knowing that the Treasury wasn’t going to make any more available at the time. We were in an era of public spending cuts. So I reformed the tariffs in order to bring in automatic digression and basically, that had the net effect of stretching it as far as possible and creating incentives to drive down the cost whilst still keeping the consumer excited. As a result, we ended up with over 1 million households with primarily solar panels on their roofs which really did give rise to something I’d first written about in 2006 in the pamphlet I wrote called Power to the People. It was talking about decentralised energy and the exciting potential of decentralised technologies to engage consumers and to actually contribute to carbon reduction. The Feed-In Tariff is probably the thing that I’m most proud of. The other thing I was extremely proud of until the government flogged it was the Green Investment Bank because I was very involved in the creation of that. It was an idea that I had and developed with colleagues. I remember the Treasury tried several times to kill it and BEIS, as it was then, was not particularly keen. With support from my old colleague, Chris Huhne, we did actually manage to ensure that we ended up with an institution. The Green Investment Bank, although it’s still notionally not what it was, it did play a pivotal role in pump-priming the offshore wind sector in particular as well as a number of other nascent low-carbon sectors. So GIB (Green Investment Bank) was a real success.
Matt: I just wanted to double-check there as well. You’ve mentioned both of these policies have now... well, one was a policy and one was a bank but they’ve now been discontinued or privatised. Should these still be in place? The Feed-In Tariff has discontinued and the Green Investment Bank was privatised. There are versions of these in the Smart Export Guarantee for the Feed-In Tariff and also we’re looking a new Infrastructure Bank which may perform some of the same roles. Are you sad to see them go?
Greg: I was sad to see them go. I mean there is a strong case to say that there shouldn’t be a Feed-In Tariff as it existed because the reason that you had a Feed-In Tariff was to subsidise what was a very high-cost technology. The cost of solar, when I became minister, was astronomical. It was the most expensive, broadly available, distributed energy technology out there. By the time I left office, it was well on the way to what it is now which is pretty much the cheapest. The advances in efficiency and the reductions in cost are breathtaking and a massive success. You don’t want to carry on subsidising something that doesn’t require subsidy because you want to put it somewhere else. However, I do think that in the haste to end subsidy for something that arguably no longer required it, they actually did away with a whole framework which could have been, largely speaking, cost neutral to the government but did create a framework which gave people the confidence to invest in their own home solar devices, in particular, or their community solar devices and gave a certainty to the income that they were going to get when buying what can be quite expensive bits of kit. I think the schemes, such as they are, that replaced it don’t have the same attractiveness to the broader consumer (what we were talking about earlier) and that sceptical consumer that did pile into the solar boom. We’ve kind of lost that. We’ve lost that excitement which I think is a real shame. So I think there is definitely a case to reboot the decentralised energy campaign that I ran when I was a minister. We need ministers to articulate that more clearly.
Rebecca: I don’t think that anyone can argue with you about the success of the Feed-In Tariffs, just looking at the rate of uptake. I remember seeing graphs showing the best-predicted values and how you just saw such a massive increase, even on what those predictions were. However, there has been a lot of academic analysis around some of the non-carbon-related outcomes of that. A lot of work has looked at how, in some cases, these policy incentives can exacerbate inequalities in the sense that a lot of people are not able to access the Feed-In Tariff, whether it’s because they do not have the ability because they’re a renter or sometimes just the lack of time, know-how or upfront capital. What has helped with that are the community schemes that you were just talking about.
Greg: Absolutely, yeah.
Rebecca: So clearly, that has a massive role to play. We’ve been talking about policies and what national government needs to do moving forward but where do you see the role of local government or community groups in driving this agenda forward, so working with national government?
Greg: We have to be clear that when I first got involved in this agenda, there was very little deployment of renewables anywhere across the board. It was still very much a specialist technology that wasn’t supplying the grid with any meaningful amounts of electricity. Now that’s completely changed. The ability, at this stage of the game, for community renewables to make a meaningful difference to the total supply of clean electricity to the grid is relatively small and certainly, probably disproportionate to the amount of political time and policy effort that would be required to really drive that agenda forward. I think your question alluded to this but I was also aware that unlike other forms of electricity generation, there was something very special about community energy that produced much more than just electricity. It did act as a catalyst for an interest not just in the generation of electricity from solar, a wind turbine or even a CHP (Combined Heat and Power) but also once you got communities engaged doing that, they then went on to want to do more things. They then got interested in insulation and energy efficiency more broadly. They then got interested in the whole sustainability agenda. They then got into thinking about how they made their community more sustainable in all senses of the word. So it’s difficult to make the argument to a narrowly defined department that’s just about creating clean electricity that actually, focusing on community energy is going to make a meaningful difference rather than putting all your efforts into getting another 3 or 5-megawatt wind turbine put out at sea. But the value that you get, the excitement and the enthusiasm with community energy is wonderful. Micro-hydro was another thing I was very excited about.
Matt: It strikes me that you actually do feel quite passionately about this and I certainly got that impression as you presided over as minister that you understood the value of community energy.
Greg: I hope so. I’d certainly got in mind but whether I got it right is another thing [laughter] but I got it, yeah.
Matt: Of course, we’ll cover off some of the other policies but what I find interesting is after 2015, community energy policy went very quiet. So what I’m interested in, in this Coalition Government, is why community energy was on the table and how it fit into the broader agenda of government at the time. I mean in 2010, we’re looking at questions and policies around Big Society and a relatively small state but you’ve mentioned also there about broader issues around net zero and trying to capture that passion and energy that people have to do something meaningful for the climate agenda. Why was it a key policy for energy in the early 2010s and under Theresa May’s government, why maybe did it fall off the agenda?
Greg: I think for the very practical reason that I alluded to in my introduction. I was very fortunate in that I had a long run-in going into government. I had nearly ten years if you combine my time on the Environmental Audit Committee when I started thinking about these issues and then as Shadow Spokesman to write pamphlets, to talk to people and to really get clear in my mind what I wanted to do and what my agenda was. That’s not typically how the British political system, regardless of party, works. I mean this weekend, the Labour Party were having a reshuffle and someone that was doing Health last week is now doing Pensions and somebody that was doing Environment last week is now sorting out the Treasury. This musical chairs in British politics is something that has many advantages but it does mean that when somebody suddenly gets landed with a brief, they don’t bring with it necessarily the same... they may well bring passion but they certainly don’t bring the same breadth of experience and understanding of that than somebody that’s spent several years really learning and teaching themselves into the job. That’s why, for me, that was a priority because it wasn’t a real priority of the department. Within the Civil Service, there are a lot of experts and very committed individuals in the Civil Service side but it’s not ultimately their job to make policy and set priorities. One of the things that was great about working at the Department of Energy and Climate Change was it did have a sense of mission. It was what we used to call a missionary department rather like DFID (Department for International Development). The people who made a positive choice to go and work there, typically really were inspired by the agenda as opposed to other departments that maybe weren’t quite so like that.
Matt: If I can come on to the next question which points to maybe one of the policies which was more difficult to deliver, the Green Deal. I think it’s something that you’ve talked about before in a fascinating interview with the Institute for Government a few years back where you spoke quite candidly about that and I thought very informatively. I just wanted to get a sense of the lessons you think we learnt through the Green Deal and what you would be recommending government to do in terms of the next steps. I just wanted to point to one particular part of this and in your interview with the IFG (Institute For Government), you said what you wanted to do was do a street-by-street, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood basis which was focused on some of the least efficient and most vulnerable homes and actually shrink the free market part of that. Is that something you still stand by now and if so, what should government be doing now?
Greg: Broadly speaking, yes it is. The thing that I also worked out with the Green Deal is that it’s the consumer experience that really mattered and that’s quite a difficult thing to guarantee in a uniform way. I remember British Gas telling me that they’d done an extensive trial of the Green Deal on a street-by-street basis in Plymouth, I think it was, and they’d had very poor take-up. They were offering heavily discounted, and almost free, insulation, solid wall and energy efficiency makeovers for a whole community, primarily semi-detached and mostly terraced housing and they’d had very, very take-up. This was a real blow and they said, ‘As a result, we’re just not going to get behind this. We will offer it but it’s not something that we can really put our shoulder to.’ I then went to another ministerial visit in the Midlands and there was a much smaller company that was operating a similar street-by-street proposition and they were getting 92% take-up. The reason was the quality of what they were offering. The company in the Midlands was offering it very much from a home improvement angle which looked nice and it added to the visual as well as the thermal value of the home; whereas, the British Gas rollout made everything look like it had just been dropped from East Germany. They specialised in getting rid of the local vernacular architecture and covering up people’s particular foibles. So the actual implementation of a street-by-street rollout is really crucial. You could have the same policy but delivered differently and get very different outcomes, so that’s challenging.
Matt: That is interesting because the Green Home Grant, which has had significant problems in terms of the consumer household offering of free grants to upgrade the efficiency of a building between £5-10,000, has had such problems that they’ve suspended that. However, the money from that has been transferred into the local authority-led part of that scheme, the more street-by-street, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood approach and managed locally by local authorities. That seems to map quite clearly onto your experiences or hopes for what the Green Deal might have delivered on. So do we think history is repeating itself a little bit here?
Greg: I think local authorities are the absolute key partner in this and, again, you get good authorities and bad authorities but where you get a good authority that is in tune with its residents and operates services efficiently, that I think is very hard to beat, particularly when they’ve got a good private sector partner with them. The other thing, though, that we didn’t really appreciate in designing the Green Deal was the resistance that there would be in the private sector to performing small jobs on houses. One of the reasons why you have to do street-by-street is to get critical mass because say you were going to spend £10,000 on a series of installations on a property, the reality is very few firms can offer the whole suite of installations that they need. Some are electrical and some are consumer electrical and it’ll be things like fitting gadgets to your fridge so it can become a smart fridge as opposed to rewiring part of the fabric of the house so you can take storage heaters or energy ground-source or air-source heat pumps. That would be a very different provider to someone that’s going to fit double-glazing and who is probably a different person that would come and fiddle about in your loft and top up your lagging which is a different person than would come and fill your cavity wall. What we realised is the call-out cost of these different trades was such that it didn’t make huge economic sense to a lot of big firms and it was quite difficult to package it together in a way that was exciting to them and that was a challenge.
Matt: There’s value associated with that but the headache that each house is different and each householder, family and occupant is different but for me, there seems to be some excitement and value in going neighbour-by-neighbourhood and street-by-street where people start chatting and saying, ‘Do you know this scheme is happening? Next door but one have had it done.’ It feels like we never got to that point or haven’t yet.
Greg: I mean we had lots of successful examples of that and little pockets where it happened but the reality is we didn’t get – what do they call it? – exit velocity. We never actually really got past people saying, ‘That’s a great trial scheme. That’s a super example,’ and then we got lift-off. I’ll tell you one of the mistakes that I would fix now, if it were in my power to fix, was to have harnessed the excitement that there was around Feed-In Tariffs with the Green Deal. Unfortunately, out of an abundance of caution, we made it very difficult for people to borrow money against the Feed-In Tariff revenue and take that income that they were getting from their solar panels and then actually buy those with the Green Deal and use the profit on that to invest in other things. This was in the aftermath of the financial crisis and we were very worried about piling consumer credit onto people or piling debt onto the national balance sheet. I think, in hindsight, that was wrong. We should have been bolder and I think if you can find one lead technology or one lead improvement, like solar, that has cut through to the general consumer, then you can harness onto that all of the other improvements that are less obvious. Equally important, if you’re going to get to that net zero target, that’s what we need to do but I think it has to be done in a street-by-street framework and in partnership with the local authorities.
Rebecca: I feel like we’ve got a real opportunity and a catalyst for action with COP26 coming to Glasgow later this year. Have you been dedicating much thought to that? Particularly, we’re interested in hearing about what some of your hopes and dreams are for that but also what are some of your fears as well.
Greg: Well, my biggest fear is that it won’t happen at all because of COVID and it will end up being some terrible sort of massive Zoom event which just won’t have the same impact [laughter]. So in actual fact, if there was a possibility, which there must be I guess because no one can be certain, that it could be scaled back because of COVID, personally, I would defer it for a few more months rather than have a less impactful online event. There is probably going to have to be some sort of hybrid solution but my biggest fear is that, out of concerns for COVID, you will lose that sense of excitement and impetus which really is important in delivering outcomes in the negotiating room. I remember being in Cancun in Mexico which was the COP that came after the failure of Copenhagen. Really, if that COP had failed to reach a conclusion, I think that it could have been the death knell of the whole UNFCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) process and we would have never have got to Paris. I just remember the sheer electricity in this huge plenary hall with a huge number of young people and people from Friends of the Earth and other civil society actors cheering on the leadership of the UN (United Nations) and giving tremendous support to all the countries that were standing up and making commitments, like the UK, and were also making their views known very clearly when countries like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and others were trying to derail the process back then. The human dimension to those negotiations really did push the tiller in the right direction. I’m a great believer in personal interaction on these important policy occasions and so my biggest fear is that the COP will be diluted by going online.
Matt: Do you think it could and should matter to every person on the street?
Greg: Oh, god yes. Absolutely.
Matt: Of course, it should matter but will it and will it have that same cut-through that you mentioned before? When we look at things like the Olympic Games in 2012, it’s obviously a very different type of event but could it have that kind of impact on the ground where communities are running fringe events and people look back on this as a turning point in the public consciousness about climate change and the action they need to take?
Greg: Yeah, I mean I think pre-COVID, that is definitely what we should have been aiming for and trying to deliver and not just a set of really quite technical and incomprehensible, at times, negotiations on the details of the UNFCC workstreams but also use it as an occasion to draw in a far, far wider group of stakeholders and communities on issues like sustainability, renewable energy and the whole excitement that there is around the opportunities being created by the switch to a low-carbon economy which are far too many to just reel off. You’re absolutely right. That is an opportunity. The big challenge is whether can we create that opportunity in COVID when only six people can meet indoors. [Laughter] It depends on how quickly the restrictions really unwind and how people can organise themselves.
Matt: Yeah, of course.
Greg: But that’s the opportunity. If we can spring out of COVID and go straight into COP with a sense of enthusiasm and ambition that is infectious, if we can do that and make a determination to act on climate infectious, then anything is possible.
Matt: Excellent. Well, here’s to hoping for that kind of event and thank you very much for your time today, Lord Barker. It’s been a pleasure.
Greg: Thanks so much and good luck with the rest of the series and perhaps I’ll see you in Glasgow.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Now for the part of the show that we’ve all been waiting for, Future or Fiction? For the uninitiated, Future or Fiction? is a game where I present our lovely hosts with a new technological innovation and they have to decide if it’s real, i.e. they think it’s the future, or if I’ve just pulled it out of my backside. Today, the invention is called... A Bug’s Life. That is A Bug’s Life.
Rebecca: I feel this is a movie that I’ve seen [laughter].
Fraser: It definitely is.
Matt: I can also see a row of Pixar films on your bookshelf just behind you.
Fraser: That’s it. You guys are the parents of young children. I have no excuse [laughter]. So we all know that plastic waste and recycling is a huge problem faced all over the world that can be a tricky business to keep on top of. However, scientists have come up with a novel solution that can help break down stubborn plastics and materials in the form of bioengineered bugs. These tiny bugs effectively eat plastic allowing us to fully recycle plastic bottles and the like. Do we think it’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?
[Music flourish]
Becky, coming to you first.
Rebecca: I’m kind of so torn here. I feel like this is so exciting. I can’t imagine where in your mind you dreamt that up [laughter] but also I’m kind of waiting to hear what Matt says because...
Matt: Because whatever I say is wrong, yes [laughter]. That’s wicked. So it’s a cunning ploy, yeah.
Rebecca: I know nothing about this sort of concept. I was kind of okay with the engineering-based ones but you’ve totally thrown me this week, Fraser, with something biological [laughter]. I didn’t even study biology at school.
Matt: I think your educational background is going to be more helpful to this one than geography [laughter]. I’m fumbling in the dark here. I’m sure I’ve heard about this but the bit I’m not convinced by is the engineered part and that somebody has developed these bugs through some kind of weird Frankenstein experiment in a lab somewhere. If they have, I’m genuinely concerned about that [laughter].
Rebecca: They’re going to start coming out for us and they’re going to be eating through our kids’ toys [laughter].
Matt: Yeah, you’re just like, ‘I’m sure I left my coffee flask around here somewhere.’ [Laughter]. Of course, plastics persist for many decades or even hundreds of years, so I don’t think nature has the answer and so I am conflicted. I’m going to wait for Becky to make a move.
Rebecca: I feel like worms are great with our compost and so why can’t bugs do plastic? I like the idea of this. I feel like if somebody asked me to invest in this, I would want to and so I’m going to go with future.
Fraser: Okay, Becky, you’re locking in with future?
Rebecca: I am, yeah.
Fraser: Matt?
Matt: Oh, it’s difficult because I think this stuff exists but I just don’t know whether it’s natural or not and there are little weasel words you’ve got in there. I’m going to bank safe and go with Becky on this one I think.
Rebecca: Oh, god!
Matt: I think it does exist because I have heard of them breaking them down, so future.
Fraser: Okay. Becky, Matt is going future. Becky, do you now want to change your answer?
Rebecca: [Laughter] No, I won’t change my mind. I’ll stick with future.
Matt: Yeah, that’s very noble of you that, Becky [laughter].
Fraser: Okay, so that’s two futures. The answer is... the future.
Matt: Yes!
Rebecca: It’s broken your losing streak [laughter].
Matt: Yes, 2021 is really coming alive today, yeah [laughter].
Fraser: Scientists in Japan have discovered and developed a super enzyme from bacteria that have evolved to eat plastic allowing for more effective and complete recycling. The super enzymes can also break down things like cotton which could allow for the recycling of clothes and other materials as well.
Matt: That sounds like there could be a few wardrobe malfunctions on the back of that as well [laughter]. I’m even more worried about these now.
Rebecca: I know. Well, they do say that it will be a bacteria or a virus that takes over the world and wipes us out completely. The virus has had its try the last few years, so bring on the bacteria.
Fraser: Now it’s bacteria’s turn, yeah.
Matt: Yeah, so a definite market application but very concerning [laughter]. Thank you, Fraser. Great stuff.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Well, we’ve managed to break Matt’s losing streak, so quite excited to see what you’ll bring us in the next episode, Fraser, but for now, I think all we’ve got left to do is to say thank you again to our wonderful guest and thank you to everybody for listening. Remember to check us out on Twitter. Use our handle @EnergyREV_UK and the hashtag #LocalZero but for now, bye.
Matt: See you soon, bye.
Fraser: Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
[Music flourish]
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