Anthony Rae 14th January 2025: In the month between 4th December-4th January 2025 this website published a series of five articles taking forward the analysis and argument of the original Will Labour fail its transport decarbonisation test? report of May 2024 (I was the author of all of these). To make the report and 5 articles a little more accessible they are now brought together in a pdf compilation (download here), which is therefore searchable.
Its one page introduction recounts the extended nature of this enterprise; it records that in little more than a year I’ve written approaching 100,000 words on the subject of transport decarbonisation. But it points out that their underlying analysis was first set out in my April 2019 briefing, the title which also suggests its motivation: The threat of rising transport carbon emissions to the Climate Change Act process. So the 2024 writings are a revisiting 5 years on of the diagnosis in the earlier briefing, and a commentary on whether the future threat it predicted actually came to pass (Yes, it did).
May’s report also effectively constituted a whole series of ‘bets against the future’, forecasting where a future Labour government might fail. To date none of those bets have been lost; the report’s analysis has stood the test of time. In a nutshell: why is it likely that Labour will fail on transport decarbonisation? Because the key policy frameworks of the DfT (for roads and aviation, modes responsible for 89% of transport emissions) are those of an inherently climate change ‘sceptic’ institution, whilst Labour’s previous and present track record reinforces that interpretation.
The series of five articles then brings us up to date after 6 months of a Labour government. Article 1 kicked off the series by asking whether the then Transport Secretary Louise Haigh’s speech about her proposed new ‘integrated transport strategy’ – made the previous week, and the day before her unexpected resignation – provided an answer to the question in the report’s title; it did not. Articles 2-3 pages 6-20 provide the essential distillation of the quantified analysis on which the 2019 briefing and 2024 report were based – how ‘aviation is eating the transport emissions budget’, and in turn ‘transport is eating the UK carbon budget’. This is the rising threat that so far two decades of transport and climate campaigning has failed to adequately challenge.
Whilst the report eschewed solutions, article 4 page 21 does propose that when on 25th February the Climate Change Committee publishes its proposed 7th carbon budget for the period 2038-42 it must revise downwards its compromised and unacceptably generous emissions pathway for aviation, which will consequently also allow the total transport emissions pathway to be reduced as well. With article 5 page 31 it suggests how an assessment of failed transport decarbonisation should be central to a third judicial review by Friends of the Earth in 2024 of the lawfulness of the UK’s entire climate plan should that be necessary.
The report remains the only comprehensive assessment of Labour’s transport decarbonisation intentions, whilst the articles provide a pathway as to how that failure can be challenged in 2025.
If you do have any questions or comments about the report/articles please do send them to info@transportnorth.org.uk