The Seventh Carbon Budget: Has Ed Miliband Signed Britain Up to a Blank Cheque?

The Government’s acceptance of the Climate Change Committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget (CB7) may prove to be one of the most consequential political decisions of this Parliament.

The target itself is simple enough. By 2040, the UK is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 87% compared with 1990 levels. Ministers describe the goal as ambitious but achievable. Critics argue that the target is detached from economic and engineering reality.

The truth may lie somewhere in between.

What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that Britain has been signed up to a destination without a fully costed roadmap showing how we get there.
The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
The debate over climate policy often focuses on emissions, targets and international agreements.

Far less attention is given to a much simpler question:

What will all of this actually cost?
The Environmental Audit Committee’s recent scrutiny of the Seventh Carbon Budget makes an important admission. While supporting the objective, the Committee repeatedly highlights concerns over delivery.
The report acknowledges major challenges involving:
Heat pump deployment.
Electricity grid expansion.
Industrial decarbonisation.
Carbon capture technology.
Workforce shortages.
Planning and infrastructure delays.
In other words, Parliament has accepted the destination while many of the roads leading there remain under construction.
The Heat Pump Challenge
Perhaps the clearest example is domestic heating.
Around 60,000 heat pumps were installed in the UK during 2023.
The Climate Change Committee’s pathway requires annual installations to rise to approximately 450,000 per year by 2030 and more than one million per year by 2035.
That is not a modest increase. It is a transformation of the entire domestic heating market.
The financial implications are equally significant.
A typical heat pump installation can cost between £10,000 and £15,000, with some properties requiring substantially more work because of insulation requirements, radiator upgrades, pipework changes or electrical improvements.
Using the UK’s 28.6 million households as a rough guide:
£10,000 per property equates to approximately £286 billion.
£15,000 per property equates to approximately £429 billion.
Not every home will require the same level of expenditure, and some costs will fall over many years. Nevertheless, the numbers illustrate the scale of the challenge.
This is not a programme measured in millions or even tens of billions. It is measured in hundreds of billions.
Carbon Capture: Hope or Reality?
Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) occupies a central role in many Net Zero pathways.
The problem is that large-scale deployment remains largely unproven.
Government support for initial CCUS clusters already runs into tens of billions of pounds over coming decades. Yet even supporters acknowledge that the technology has not been demonstrated at the scale required to meet future carbon budgets.
The more reliance policymakers place on carbon capture, the greater the risk that future governments discover the technology cannot deliver as anticipated or can only do so at vastly higher cost.
That is not an argument against innovation.
It is an argument against assuming success before success has been demonstrated.
The Grid Nobody Talks About
Then there is the electricity network itself.
Every Net Zero pathway depends upon a massive expansion of Britain’s grid infrastructure.
New transmission lines.
New substations.
New transformers.
New converters.
New storage facilities.
New connections.
The National Energy System Operator’s Beyond 2030 programme alone involves tens of billions of pounds of investment.
Yet those costs represent only a portion of the overall transformation required.
Many projects currently waiting for grid connections are already facing delays stretching into the next decade.

This creates a fundamental question:
How can the Government promise rapid electrification of transport, heating and industry if the infrastructure required to support that electrification remains years behind schedule?

Hydrogen: The Next Expensive Experiment?
Hydrogen is frequently presented as another key component of the future energy system.
Yet hydrogen faces significant challenges.
Producing green hydrogen requires vast quantities of electricity.
Transporting hydrogen requires new infrastructure.
Storing hydrogen presents technical and economic difficulties.
Using hydrogen often involves substantial efficiency losses compared with direct electrification.
The technology may eventually play an important role in specific industrial sectors.
What remains unclear is whether it can realistically become the economy-wide solution some advocates suggest without costs running into hundreds of billions of pounds.
The Trillion-Pound Question
Supporters of the carbon budgets argue that climate inaction would also carry substantial costs.
That is a legitimate argument and deserves serious consideration.
However, it does not remove the need for transparent accounting.
If heat decarbonisation alone may cost hundreds of billions, if carbon capture requires tens of billions, if grid expansion requires tens of billions more, and if hydrogen infrastructure must be built on a national scale, then the cumulative expenditure begins to move towards territory measured not merely in billions, but potentially in trillions of pounds over several decades.
The public deserves an honest conversation about that reality.

A Fair Challenge to Ed Miliband
The strongest criticism of the Government is not that reducing emissions is impossible.
Nor is it that climate change should be ignored.
The stronger criticism is this:
Ed Miliband has signed Britain up to the Seventh Carbon Budget without first presenting a comprehensive, transparent and fully costed delivery plan showing exactly how the target will be achieved, who will pay for it, and what happens if the assumptions prove wrong.

That is not climate scepticism.
It is basic due diligence.
Before committing future generations to one of the largest infrastructure and economic transformations in British history, Parliament should know the full cost.
So should the public.
And until those answers are provided, it is entirely reasonable to ask whether Britain has been committed to a destination without knowing the true price of the journey.

Shane Oxer.   Campaigner for fairer and affordable energy