Environmental Audit Committee — hearing of 15 June 2026: transcript & video

00:02 - 03:01

Speaker 2

Order, order. Well, welcome everybody to the latest meeting of the Environmental Audit Committee. And this is a follow-up meeting to the report that this committee did on Carbon Budget Seven and more recently the response that we've had from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. We're very pleased to have with us today Minister Katie White, the Minister for Climate, and Mr. McLaughlin from the department. Firstly, welcome.

Secondly, questions that this committee raise will be to yourself, Minister. If there's any of those you think are more appropriately answered by Mr. McLaughlin, we'll leave that to you to pass on. If there are questions that we consider to be more political than departmental, I'm sure it's unlikely you would have passed those on anyway, but we would say. But beyond that, we'll leave it to you to decide who's most appropriate to answer. We're grateful to the department for their involvement of this committee in the Carbon Budget Seven process.

Also grateful for the far greater scrutiny that this process will go through than previous iterations have done. So that is very much welcome and the fact that we were able to get you here at relatively short notice to respond. There's a number of things that were raised within our report that government have subsequently responded to and some questions that we felt we didn't entirely understand where the department was, so we'll go through those as we are. But there's one area that I will just start on in advance of that because it appears to be slightly shifting sands in terms of where we thought the land lay and briefings are suggesting might change, and that is the issue of the government's zero emissions vehicles mandate. It's been reported this week or this weekend that the government is considering changing the ZEV mandate.

As we know that the industry is on target with government's requests of it in the period up to 2025. And as reducing emissions from vehicles is the government's single biggest carbon-saving measure, we are very interested in what implications any changes might have for the delivery of Carbon Budget Seven. So I mean, what can you tell us at this stage, Minister, about whether there are plans to alter what we'd previously understood to be the government's position on the ZEV mandate?

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