Why Andy Burnham should act on the evidence outside the window and stick with net zero

Britain’s net zero economy is now worth more than £100bn a year and supports over a million jobs, most of them in small and medium-sized firms. For Labour’s likely next leader, walking away from it would be an act of economic self-harm dressed up as pragmatism.

Britain’s net zero economy is booming. The sector is worth around £105bn a year to the UK, has outpaced every other part of the economy, and supports better-paid jobs than the national average. According to the CBI’s Net Gains analysis, the average worker in the sector generates roughly £119,300 in economic value, some 48 per cent above the UK norm, with a £455bn pipeline of investment waiting to be built.

So when a union leader suggests that the man who has overseen this record, the energy secretary Ed Miliband, would be a “noose around the neck” of job creation, as Unite’s Sharon Graham has done, it might seem extraordinary. But the debate on net zero is often suffused with more wasted heat and less useful light than an old incandescent bulb.

Andy Burnham, widely tipped as Labour’s next leader and a prospective prime minister, is now coming under pressure to join the sceptics and reverse the party’s longstanding championing of renewable energy and low-carbon industry. There are several hard-nosed commercial reasons why he should resist.

“Net zero is one of the few glues that unites Labour’s coalition,” says Luke Tryl, executive director of the non-profit research agency More in Common. “There is limited electoral benefit to ditching it and much potential harm.”

More than 60 per cent of people support net zero and climate action, numerous polls suggest. Although the issue is eclipsed by the cost of living as a voter priority, its appeal crosses political divides. About a third of Reform voters back the target, despite the onslaught against it from Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, whose party has urged the energy industry to abandon net zero altogether in favour of nuclear and gas.

At the other end of the spectrum, Labour haemorrhaged votes to the pro-climate Greens and Liberal Democrats at the local elections. YouGov polling showed that for every 2024 Labour voter who switched to Reform, about six switched instead to the Lib Dems or the Greens. In many seats it was that move to the left, rather than any drift to the right, that handed Reform the opening to win.

The numbers suggest Labour has little to gain electorally from weakening on net zero, and a great deal to lose. Yet Joe Dromey, general secretary of the Fabian Society, says the message has not reached every corner of the party.
“Quite a few people have been learning the wrong lessons from the very painful defeats in the local elections,” he says. “While Labour lost seats to Reform, they lost votes to the other progressive parties. But those voters are much more likely to consider voting Labour again in future, they are available to win back. Watering down Labour’s bold contributions to green policy and net zero would do more harm than good.”

Political calculation aside, tackling the climate crisis and cutting Britain’s dependence on imported oil and gas also makes commercial sense. While Unite and the GMB, whose members rely on the oil and gas sector, have called for an end to the ban on new North Sea drilling, most unions support net zero.

Jobs in the North Sea have been in steady decline for more than 15 years, and opening new fields is unlikely to stem the losses for long, given that more than 90 per cent of the basin’s oil and gas has already been extracted. Even under the previous Conservative government, the 36,000 people directly employed in the North Sea in 2013, plus the 200,000 estimated to work in its supply chain, had fallen to roughly 30,000 direct and 100,000 supporting jobs by 2024.

Burnham has frequently called for “reindustrialisation”, which some have read as code for opposition to net zero. Alasdair Johnstone, of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, says it need not be.

“The clean tech revolution is already driving clean reindustrialisation in areas such as the Humber and the North East,” he says. “Thousands of small businesses and more than a million jobs are now dependent on the net zero economy. The world is clearly shifting towards electrification, so any new industry needs to be clean if it is going to survive into the future.”

Any hint of wavering could prove costly, he adds. “Many of the UK’s main car factories are already retooling for electric vehicles. Signals and consistency matter, so investors deciding where to put their money will be listening carefully to whatever emerges from Burnham’s camp in the coming weeks.”

Burnham had a strong environmental record as mayor of Greater Manchester, where he set a target of carbon neutrality by 2038 and championed clean energy, electric buses, insulation and nature projects. It is a record that has not gone unnoticed by those urging him to keep faith.

“This record shows he understands the importance of these issues and is willing to fight for them,” says Robbie MacPherson, a Kennedy scholar at Harvard University and former head of the UK’s all-party parliamentary group on climate. “As MP for Makerfield, he knows the importance of ensuring communities are prepared for proliferating climate impacts such as flooding. As future leader of the Labour party, he has the responsibility to bring to life the most ambitious climate and clean energy programme any British government has ever been elected on.”

That ambition has a champion in cabinet. Miliband has insisted Labour will win the fight against net zero critics by creating jobs in offshore wind, pointing to a £1bn investment scheme aimed at Teesside, Scotland, south Wales and East Anglia.

This month’s record heatwave, the year’s second, has offered a foretaste of the threat the climate crisis poses to the UK economy. Schools have closed, transport has descended into chaos and productivity has taken a hit, before counting the likely loss of life. European economies, the UK included, stand to lose an estimated $600bn from extreme heat by 2030.

The cost of acting, by contrast, looks modest. The government’s own statutory adviser, the Climate Change Committee, has calculated that the entire price of reaching net zero by 2050 is smaller than the hit Britain absorbed from a single fossil fuel price shock in 2022, with benefits returning between two and four times every pound spent.

The required response should be clear, says Angharad Hopkinson, a political campaigner at Greenpeace UK. “The only way off this hellish treadmill is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Our next prime minister needs to act on the evidence outside their window, and the advice of their scientific advisers, and stay the course on climate policies. The alternative is parched reservoirs, unaffordable food, shuttered hospitals and schools and wildly fluctuating bills each time a new oil war is kindled.”

For a politician who built his Manchester legacy on clean buses and warm homes, the choice ought not to be a difficult one. The evidence, commercial as much as climatic, is sitting right outside the window.