Climate and Energy

Keeps the lights on, the bills moving, and the 2030 net zero target technically still in the diary.

How long storm overflows spilled sewage in every council area and constituency in England and Northern Ireland, and for each water company.

Digital reporting became compulsory for more than 12,000 permitted waste sites in England from 1 October. Waste carriers, brokers and dealers are not required to join until October 2027. Defra's own implementation guidance describes the current system as the first stage of a phased rollout. The evidence base for the policy's £900 million annual estimate of waste crime was last refreshed in 2018/19.

Applications have opened for the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme, expected to cost around £600 million a year and cut electricity bills for more than 10,000 manufacturers by up to 25 per cent. A comparable scheme, the British Industry Supercharger, has been running since April 2024. No published evaluation shows how much additional investment, production or employment resulted from that support.

The government has announced what it calls a "pathway to stronger public control" of England's water industry. No water company is being taken into public ownership. The distinction matters.

The government has created Great British Grid to invest public capital in electricity transmission infrastructure alongside private investors. Its budget for the long term will be set at a future Spending Review. No first project has been identified and the launch documents contain no quantified estimate of how much its investments will reduce household bills.

Ministers say an expansion backed by the government in Cornwall will produce enough lithium for more than 180,000 electric car batteries a year. Earlier government and company figures point to a very different number.

Ten years after the Environment Agency launched a national programme to restore England's salmon stocks, 40 of the country's 42 principal salmon rivers are now classified as at risk or probably at risk of failing to sustain their populations. That is 95 per cent, up from 88 per cent in the previous assessment and the worst position recorded. The Environment Agency has set out another programme over the long term, running to 2032.

Andy Burnham's government has announced a £850 million cut to VAT on electricity bills, funded in part by scrapping the digital ID programme. The savings from that cancellation have not yet been published. Cancelling digital ID removes a genuine future spending pressure, but the government has not published the departmental arithmetic showing how £600 million of annual digital ID pressure becomes £850 million available for the VAT measure in 2026/27.

South East Water has lost its chair and chief executive after MPs declared they had no confidence in the company's leadership. Regulators have since formally found breaches of statutory and licence obligations, accepted legally enforceable undertakings and required the company to produce plans it has not yet completed. An independent monitor will report directly to Ofwat on whether those plans are delivered.

On 6 July, the government responded to a parliamentary proposal to begin phasing PFAS out of products such as food packaging, cookware and school uniforms from 2027. It did not accept the timetable. Ministers said they would wait to see how the EU's proposed wider restriction deals with consumer products that are not essential. The same response says there is "plausible evidence" that continued PFAS emissions could cause serious or irreversible pollution.