‘With Reform you get people investing in net zero and then opposing it and that doesn’t make sense to me.’
Labour MP Tom Hayes, the party’s National Mission Champion for Energy, has warned against learning the wrong lessons from the recent local election results, saying that the message wasn’t to ‘stop net zero’ but rather to tackle the sense of hopelessness people feel.
Speaking at Ukreiif, the country’s biggest investment conference, on how to make the UK a clean energy superpower, Hayes said that decarbonisation ‘wasn’t about deindustrialising it’s about rediscovering how to re-industrialise’, and called for a renewed cross-party consensus to tackle the shared challenge of climate change.
Net zero policies have come under attack from the Conservatives and an insurgent Reform UK which continues to rise in the polls after its recent local election successes, with pressure growing on the government from the right-wing media and politicians to row back on net zero policies, which they claim are too costly, despite the disastrous effects of climate change.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has also called for a major rethink of net zero policies, arguing that limiting energy consumption and fossil fuel production is “doomed to fail”.
However, Hayes, the MP for Bournemouth East, has said that the lesson from recent election results isn’t to row back on net zero, and that his experience from campaigning in areas like Runcorn was that people wanted Westminster to address the sense of hopelessness they feel about our political institutions and their ability to tackle issues that matter to them.
He also warned against a fragmenting of the political consensus on net zero which had existed previously, telling the audience that it was about tackling a shared threat we all faced, while also securing energy security and bringing people’s bills down by relying less on fossil fuels.
“Let’s try to get back to that consensus, the way to do that is we have shared threats, we need to highlight that, people want to see bills come down.”
He also hit out at Reform, saying that with “Reform you get people investing in net zero and then opposing it and that doesn’t make sense to me.”
It was revealed earlier in the year that former Reform MP Rupert Lowe installed solar panels on his farm to save money on energy bills, despite his party pledging to tax solar energy and claiming renewables are more expensive.
Hayes also said that GB energy had a crucial role to play in the transition to net zero, so long as it was able to invest in and loan money to local authorities to help them build new clean energy projects in communities.
Basit Mahmood is editor at Left Foot Forward
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