United Kingdom Public Service Departments tasked with delivering on the Government’s commitment to make the country a net-zero carbon emissions economy by 2050 lack the skills and capacity to do so, according to a new report.
In a joint paper, the Institute for Government think tank and Involve, a public engagement charity, said the wide-ranging transformation would require significant levels of public involvement to ensure initiatives worked as intended and had widespread support.
They said there was limited Government capability and expertise on public engagement and little co-ordination of activities between Departments.
The Institute and charity added that in many Departments, engaging the public is simply “not prioritised as a part of policy-making”.
They said that with a vast range of measures required to meet the net-zero target, including new taxes and subsidies to support the replacement of gas boilers or encouraging changes in diet, developing policies in partnership with citizens would be crucial.
The Institute and charity pointed to the failure of successive recent initiatives to improve the energy efficiency of homes as a stark indicator of the consequences of failing to design policy in partnership with the public and business bodies.
“The Green Deal, the [former] Coalition Government’s flagship energy efficiency program, was abandoned after only two years having had low take-up and delivering almost no energy savings,” they said.
“The National Audit Office said that the Department of Energy and Climate Change had based the policy on wrong assumptions, failed to test its plans and implemented them chaotically.”
They said the Green Homes Grant, a successor policy designed as a stimulus measure in the 2020 Budget, similarly flopped, with the Government apparently failing to take account of the lack of a ready-to-go supply chain that could respond quickly.
“Many homeowners were also put off applying for what was an overly complex scheme,” the Institute and charity said.
London, 7 September 2021
