The Conservative Party leadership contest was finally whittled down to a two-horse race last week between the former Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss.
But with the cost-of-living crisis dominating the narrative of the contest so far, and amid the high-profile sparring between the two candidates on the economy and taxation, one policy area that’s barely had a look in is the environment.
Both Sunak and Truss have ticked the checkbox of committing to reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, but further detail on their specific policy intentions remains scant.
The only ‘green’ policy from the race that has made the headlines in recent weeks is Truss vowing to scrap the environmental levies on energy bills, whereas Sunak will not – pointing to their impact on growing the renewable sector.
Aside from a degree of lip service to net zero, Sunak’s commitment to keeping the green levies and, conversely, Truss’s desire to scrap them, can only really be seen through the lens of the cost-of-living crisis – it’s just a reframing of the headline debate on tax policy.
Getting into the weeds of what both candidates have said on the environment during the contest and in the last year paints a similar picture.
While Sunak has said he will expand the offshore wind programme (though is clear in opposing onshore), his other green commitments are doggedly fused to growing the economy in tandem, reflecting the underlying fiscal focus of the former Chancellor. He plans to make the UK energy self-sufficient by 2045, and net zero targets, he says, need to be met by increasing economic growth. Sunak also aims to make the UK the ‘first ever net-zero aligned global financial centre’.
Similarly, Truss has said reaching net zero must be achieved ‘in a way that doesn’t harm businesses or consumers.’ The Foreign Secretary has, however, gone further away from longstanding Conservative green policy safe spaces than Sunak, indicating that she will review the ban on fracking and cut subsidies for solar farms, which she has called ‘a blight on the landscape’.
Looking back at the parliamentary careers of the two candidates, too, together with their specific voting records on the environment, seems to confirm their hesitant green credentials.
Sunak has consistently voted against measures to prevent climate change, including in 2020 on the Government’s plan to eliminate transport emissions by 2030. More recently, he was vehemently opposed to the planned windfall tax on energy firms until political and public pressure became too great.
Sunak did, however, bring in the plastic packaging tax for manufactures and importers while Chancellor. The tax imposes charges per tonne on packaging comprising less than 30% recycled plastic. Having come into force in April 2022, however, the tax has already faced criticism by campaigners as being a blunt instrument that could potentially even inhibit ambition to push recycling rates beyond levels specified in the legislation. The results of Greenpeace and Everyday Plastic’s ‘Big Plastic Count’ published earlier this month suggest efforts to reduce single-use plastic packaging remain slow.
Truss’s past voting record also points to a consistent opposition to environmental measures, including in 2020 with a vote against ministers having due regard to the 2050 net zero target.
Her poor green voting record is in spite of a two-year tenure as Environment Secretary between 2014 and 2016. During Truss’s time at Defra, recycling rates in England fell for the first time ever and subsidies for solar farms were cut, with critics pointing to her prioritising farming, nature and food production over the waste and resources industries.
Her other ministerial positions have demonstrated similar ideological leanings. While Chief Secretary to the Treasury under Theresa May, Truss opposed the UK’s bid to host the COP26 summit and, more recently at the Foreign Office, she ordered the foreign aid budget to be diverted from environmental projects in favour of support to women and girls.
While the two candidates’ stances on the environment are particularly lacklustre for the relatively green Conservative governments we’ve come to know since David Cameron’s much vaunted husky hugging trip to the Arctic in 2010, climate and net-zero sceptics abound within the party, both in Parliament and in the country.
One in 15 Conservative MPs believe climate change is a myth, according to a survey of 100 of them by The Independent in November 2021, and both Sunak and Truss have well-documented climate sceptics among their backers, many of whom currently attend, or have previously attended, Cabinet. They include Mark Spencer and Michael Ellis for Sunak, and Wendy Morton, Jacob Rees-Mogg and James Cleverley for Truss.
As regards the view of the wider party, a YouGov poll for The Times with Conservative members published a fortnight ago to coincide with the leadership challenge showed that only 4% of those surveyed said hitting net zero by 2050 was one of their three priorities for the next leader. Indeed, the policy came bottom of all 10 policy areas surveyed. Predictably, winning the next election, controlling immigration and the cost-of-living crisis were the top three priorities in the polling.
So, while the two candidates relegating the environment to the sidelines in favour of the headline policy debates of the campaign could, at least for now, be attributed to tactical dog whistling, both Sunak and Truss’s recent Westminster form suggests this trend will continue.
The contest for the next Tory leader – not to mention Britain’s next Prime Minister – still remains firmly in the balance, but one thing we can be reasonably confident of is that whichever candidate emerges from the battlefield victorious, the policy agenda will look a lot more blue than green.
