PM Gordon Brown announced on 3 October the creation of a new Government Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC). Ed Miliband has been appointed the department’s Secretary of State, which sees him take over policy areas previous led by John Hutton at the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), who oversaw energy, and Hilary Benn at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) under whose remit fell climate change.
Mr Miliband said: “The new department reflects the fact that energy policy and climate change are directly linked. My job is to make sure our policy on climate change is fair for ordinary families and our policy on energy is sustainable for future generations. We will do all we can to ensure affordable fuel bills for people, put Britain at the forefront of creating green jobs and play our part in ensuring every country meets the climate change challenge.”
Reaction to the formation of the new department has been broadly well received. Stephen Hale, director of environmental think tank Green Alliance, said: “Hallelulah. A department of energy and climate change. Not before time. Ed Miliband’s in-tray is piled high with issues that the old structure did not resolve. The new department puts climate change where it belongs, with its own seat at the Cabinet table.”
The combining of energy and climate change departments has long been mooted. The Sustainable Development Commission, which is the Government’s independent advisors on the environment, had recommended combining energy and climate change policy under a single environment secretary in the Commission’s 2007 report on the role of regulator Ofgem.
How the new department will dovetail with the Government’s zero-carbon housing commitments, which fall under the Department for Communities and Local Government’s (DCLG) remit, has not yet been made clear. But it will no longer be Caroline Flint’s responsibility. She has left the department to be replaced as the Minister of State (Housing) by the Rt Hon Margaret Beckett MP.
One of Ms Beckett’s first challenges is to manage the Government’s eco-towns programme that is in danger of becoming a calamity. Already, several proposals have been withdrawn, leaving the government having to delay until 2009 the announcement of which sites will proceed to construction.
Now, rumours abound that draft guidance, written by external consultants for the DCLG, suggests that the eco-town homes should not be measured against the Government’s own Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH), but instead should be gauged against a European model of energy output per square metre.
What does that say about the Government having faith in its own Code? And how can it ask housebuilders to adhere to a Code that it itself may not enforce at its own ‘sponsored’ eco-towns? By the way, more than 18 months since the Government introduced the CSH, it has yet to publish its definition of zero-carbon – a key premise of the Code. Ms Beckett has much work to do indeed.
