Comment & Analysis
The Conservative and Unionist Party have won 364 seats with one in St Ives still remaining uncalled and have therefore passed the 326 threshold to form a majority Government. After an election fought largely on the issue of Brexit, they will now vote in Parliament to pass the new withdrawal agreement that has been negotiated with the EU. They will then have to work to the very tight deadline of 1 January 2021 to ‘get Brexit done’ (though this can be extended with agreement of the EU). But aside from Brexit, and with a focus on engineering, what have the Conservatives said they will do over the next five years and is it a radical departure from what we have seen before?
Energy and climate change was an issue at this election in a way that has never been seen before. As James Murray from the environmental website Business Green wrote recently,
"The policy programmes put forward by the main parties differ in their ambition, emphasis, and detail, but they all mark a significant improvement on the current green policy landscape and promise to provide a major boost to the green economy and the wider climate agenda."
Indeed, earlier this year, the Government amended the Climate Change Act to change the decarbonisation target for the UK from an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from a 1990 baseline to ‘net zero’. Despite other parties promising to get to net zero even faster, this is in itself hugely ambitious with a panoply of economic, political and engineering challenges to overcome in order to meet it.
But it is easy for politicians to make promises about how the world will look 30 years from now. What is most important is what the Conservatives are going to do in the next five years. There are many ways to decarbonise our society quickly, the question is will this be made possible by the Conservatives?
Carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) finally seems to be gaining momentum again. The UK’s independent advisory body on decarbonisation, the Committee on Climate Change, say CCUS is a ‘necessity not an option’ and it seems the Government are listening. Various regions of the country with existing industry and suitable geology for sequestering carbon dioxide are vying to be the country’s first CCUS hub. The Conservative manifesto promises ‘£800 million to build the first fully deployed carbon capture storage cluster by the mid-2020s’. The other significant promise on energy is a plan to expand offshore wind capacity to 40 GW (from 8.5 GW today) by 2030, which if delivered will have to be carefully managed by National Grid to ensure the electricity system can cope with such a rapid and large expansion of variable and asynchronous generation. There are also warm words but little detail on other low carbon options like nuclear (including fusion).
The IMechE will soon publish an update to our 2009 report The Energy Hierarchy in which we say that the first priorities in energy policy should always be demand reduction and energy efficiency. These have not received enough attention in recent years. The smart meter roll-out has struggled and the withdrawal of the Green New Deal in 2015 was indicative of insufficient focus on upgrading our building stock to modern standards. The Government are now promising to invest ‘£9.2 billion in the energy efficiency of homes, schools and hospitals’.
On transport, the Conservatives say they will consult on whether to bring forward the 2040 ban on sales of petrol and diesel vehicles. The previous Secretary of State for Transport, Grant Shapps, was rumoured before the election to be keen on this, but it would not be without its engineering challenges. Assuming that most of these vehicles will be powered by batteries, the design and roll-out of infrastructure to enable charging will need to be a priority. As well as simply providing enough charge points to ensure ‘range anxiety’ does not prevent the uptake of electric cars, local networks will need to be upgraded and charging will need to be smart to ensure they are not overloaded. In addition, the Government should remember that even if the ban is brought forward, vehicles with internal combustion engines will still be on our roads into the 2040s and there is still much to be done to improve their efficiency and reduce their contribution to air pollution.
There is a large focus on road building, but also ambitions to improve rail services across the country. The Government want to promote the Northern Powerhouse and Midlands Engine schemes through investment in transport infrastructure, while they will also begin to reopen some of the Beeching lines that were closed in the 1960s. An obvious omission from the manifesto is any promise to expand electrification of the rail network, something that will be necessary to meet decarbonisation plans in the future.
Finally, research, development and innovation funding will continue to grow, which is to be welcomed, particularly money for large-scale demonstration of new technologies. The UK’s research base is the envy of the world, but it is so often said that the nation does not capitalise on it to develop new products and markets that it has become a cliché.
One of the key recommendations in the National Engineering Policy Centre’s (NEPC) report on priorities for our future economy and society is to increase Innovate UK’s budget. The NEPC is a newly created body set up to co-ordinate policy work between the professional engineering institutions. We believe that by working together we can amplify the voice of the engineering community and ensure that whatever decisions the new Government makes, they are informed by sound advice from our combined extensive network of technical expertise.