Rishi Sunak was warned on Wednesday not to “mess around” by delaying action until after the General Election to get Britain back as a world leader in tackling climate change.
Chris Stark, chief executive of Britain’s Climate Change Committee, said the country had fallen behind other nations in the fight against global warming amid Tory infighting in Government.
He told Sky News: “We have got some very important targets in this country which were only set a couple of years ago and it looks very much like that we are off track now to hit those goals that we proclaimed to the world that we wanted to hit by 2030 and beyond.
“There is still time to fix that but we can’t mess around for the next year and wait for the General Election, we have got to have some big decisions from this Government to take us back on the path.”
The watchdog accused ministers of “ducking strategic decisions”, possibly until after the election, on issues such as transport, energy and home heating.
Mr Stark stressed that Britain’s leadership position on addressing global warming had been “very substantially challenged” in the last year, with the US making “great strides” with the Inflation Reduction Act, and the European Union also making progress.
He added: “In that 12 months that we have just seen the UK has been gripped by an internal discussion about leadership of the Conservative Party, (we) have not been looking beyond our borders at some of these big steps.”
It is the 15th such report from the CCC, which has been tracking the Government’s decarbonisation efforts since the introduction of the Climate Change Act 2008.
Last year, a High Court judge ruled that the Government must provide greater transparency on its net zero plans but now the CCC said that as a result, it has less confidence in the UK reaching milestone targets for 2030.
UK greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by 46 per cent from 1990 levels, mainly because of the removal of coal from electricity generation.
The Government has pledged to reduce emissions by 68 per cent by 2030 but the CCC said the pace of scale-up action is “worryingly slow”.
Four areas in particular have the climate advisers concerned - industry, transport, buildings and fuel supply.
They said the pace of decarbonisation in these sectors over the next seven years has to quadruple what it has been over the previous eight.
The Government claimed to be a world leader in net zero despite the CCC saying it is throwing that position away by supporting the development of new oil, gas and coal at home while telling other countries to stop.
It also highlighted decarbonising electricity, the one area the CCC said has moved at the correct pace so far, but did not address any of the specific issues raised in the CCC’s report, such as how to realistically decarbonise industry, transport and buildings.
A Government spokesperson said: “The UK is cutting emissions faster than any other G7 country and attracted billions of investment into renewables, which now account for 40 per cent of our electricity.
“In the last year alone, we have confirmed the first state backing of a nuclear project in over 30 years and invested billions to kick-start new industries like carbon capture and floating offshore wind.”
Mr Stark said the Government could do much more to encourage the adoption of low-carbon technologies such as heat pumps, as the UK currently ranks 21st in Europe for the number of heat pumps installed.
There could also be more incentives for people to change to electric vans and more charge points, with a change in pricing to avoid entrenching further inequality.
Mr Stark said: “We’re reinforcing a general unfairness here if we don’t act on this with policy.
“Those who are rich enough to have that company car Tesla and the driveway and can charge it overnight have the cheapest car travel now by some margin.
“Those of the population that don’t have those benefits do not have that opportunity in front of them and face higher costs when they drive their car.”
The UK’s climate is warming along with the global average and last year saw 40C for the first time on record - grassfires destroyed dozens of properties and there were more than 3,000 excess deaths during the heatwaves.
Despite this, the Government is wasting time by shying away from taking difficult decisions, such as allowing new homes to be built that will need retrofitting, the committee warned.
