The message is Net Zero is a good thing, we should get on with it, delaying only gets more expensive, communities and people are important, and there is an international race where we don’t want to be at the back.
Its 25 recommendations summarised:
Sort out housing
Government to make long term decisions
Invest in R&D and technology – CCUS, H2, Nuclear, Tidal
Clean up Oil and Gas
Empower communities and people
Importantly for a Tory he is making the case for government intervention, there is very little of ‘let the market sort out the problems’. He wants government owned investment banks, a myriad of quangos, Great British Nuclear, and a Office for Net Zero Delivery (perhaps responded to in part with Grant Shapps’s new role?)
It’s quite hard to work out which of the current trends Skidmore is against. The message is ‘do everything’ and total football is a beautiful thing to watch, it is hard to implement policies on all fronts at all times.
It’s an encyclopaedia of current Net Zero thinking, which is a great reference book, but doesn’t make good reading from front to back. The plot gets thin at points and the reader gets lost by an author who is intent on describing every aspect of the scene. The story is told through 6 pillars, which cover design principles, the energy system design, the business case, the local case, the personal case, and finally everything else.
The FT sees this primarily as a report for the Tory Party, and as a call for action from within, and if one of their own gang is saying this then they better listen.
I would have liked to have seen the ‘big-5’ more clearly – Homes, Transport, Industry, Nuclear, Energy Markets. This would have given him fewer but harder punching recommendations than the 124 in the report.
