"Altogether we are failing to deliver": The Lord Deben interview

Lord Deben (Credit: Louise Haywood-Schiefer for The House Magazine)

Sophie Church

@sophiealichurch

John Gummer, now known as Lord Deben, grew up in a Victorian vicarage in Cheshire. While the family had little money, the vicarage had a large garden with a patch for the young boy to plant seeds. The home was surrounded by disused army training areas, ideal for exploring. “It was a wild place, which was wonderful,” he says. 

In teaching respect for nature, his family brought the children up to be stewards of the world around them. “It was always made clear to us that we didn’t have anything ourselves… and therefore, you looked after it. So I always had a view about the duty of human beings to be stewards.”

Many years later, this sense of duty saw Gummer enter government: firstly, as Margaret Thatcher’s agriculture, fisheries and food minister, then as John Major’s environment secretary. In 2010, Gummer was made a life peer, becoming Lord Deben – a title inspired by the River Deben in Suffolk. 

Altogether, we are failing to deliver. And I think the whole political system is responsible

Deben is now preparing to step down as chair of the Climate Change Committee, a position he has held for 11 years. The findings of the committee’s most recent report to Parliament have cast doubt on the progress the United Kingdom has made in adapting to climate change, and he seems frustrated. 

“Altogether we are failing to deliver, and I think the whole political system is responsible,” he says. “What is so interesting is that at the same time as the government is failing to have a proper delivery programme, the opposition has no programme in which it says: ‘if we were in government, we would do this’. So even on absolutely clear matters, like not giving permission for new oil wells – which is quite clearly wrong – the Labour Party has not said it wouldn’t.”

While all political parties are responsible for committing to net-zero pledges, it is the government’s duty to push departments to act – and some, Deben says, need more encouragement than others. 

In March, leaked civil service documents revealed that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) failed to develop green policy as effectively as other departments, lagging 24 per cent behind its official target. “Defra is a department which has no full programme to reach net-zero, which is a scandal,” Lord Deben says. 

After being found to have breached the Climate Change Act in court last year, the government produced a revised net-zero strategy. However, The Times reports that climate groups have taken steps towards applying for a judicial review of the new strategy. “The sadness is that it took a court case to force them even to produce this revised version, which is not good enough,” Deben says.

The government is also facing legal challenges for granting planning permission for a new Cumbrian coal mine, an act Deben describes as “absolutely barmy”. “The ridiculous concept of having a coal mine in Cumbria… is that even if the coal it produced was used to the maximum by the British steel industry… it would still be exporting 85 per cent of that coal.” Nonetheless, Deben says: “I don’t think the coal mine will in the end go ahead. The economics of the whole thing will decide that.”

Instead of licensing more polluting projects, Deben believes we must incentivise green investment. However, he says how we will do so is lacking in our net-zero strategy. “It does not face the fact that both the European Union and the United States are actually actively doing very significant things to encourage investment in green things, and we are not making ourselves the kind of green hub that we ought to be.” To attract investment into the United Kingdom, we should mend our relationship with Europe, make research and development more viable, and open our doors to foreign students, he advises. 

When it comes to reaching net-zero, Deben recognises learning from other countries is vital. He takes the example of Energy Performance Certificates, which he has previously described as “not fit for purpose”. “The Scottish government actually has got an investigation into it,” he reveals. “I don’t understand why the rest of the United Kingdom government does not say: ‘Well, why don’t the Scots do this, and we will accept whatever comes out?’”

Energy efficiency is a “number one” priority for Deben, calling for housebuilders who have built energy inefficient homes to pay back what he believes is owing. “We have built a million and a half homes which are not fit for the future, all of which will have to be retrofitted as a result,” he says. “And the house builders have done a terrible thing, which is to take a profit today and hand a bill on to everybody who has bought one of those houses, which is why I’m a believer of having a fund which every house builder that has built more than 100 houses would pay into every year in order to pay for… retrofitting.” 

Deben also targets the oil and gas sector in his call for financial reparations, and wants ExxonMobil, in particular, to pay up. “ExxonMobil of all the companies is the one that did most damage in the first place and lied most widely,” he says. Investigative exposés accused the company of spreading disinformation on climate change in the late 20th century, which some researchers say delayed the world from taking action on it. 

 “I don’t want to see local authorities or national authorities using any of the products of this company until it starts to understand that it should be paying…reparations out of its enormous profits for the damage it’s done.” However, Deben says he has not “seen any sign of the government recognising that they ought to pay for the damage they have done”.

A spokesperson for ExxonMobil told The House: “ExxonMobil operates to the highest standards of business conduct and professionalism, and we take these unsubstantiated and incorrect allegations extremely seriously.” They went on: “We have long acknowledged the reality and risks of climate change. We plan to play a leading role in the energy transition globally and are investing over $17bn over the next six years in technologies that can help reduce emissions.”

Despite Deben’s repeated calls for what “should be” and “ought to” be done, he says he is optimistic for the future. “I know 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that we would have moved as fast as this, I wouldn’t have believed that government would have committed itself to net-zero by 2050 [and] I wouldn’t have believed that we’d have got an agreement in Paris in which every country on earth signed up to deal with this.”

He becomes most animated when musing on the innovations that the public, instead, may not have believed possible. For instance, he describes a new way of forecasting the weather, that enables pilots to fly close above or below the inclement patch to conserve fuel. Or the changes to our diets which, “won’t be the ones the vegans think!”

While Deben sees Brexit as “extremely damaging” he insists we need to work together to tackle climate change.

“What you can’t do is to sit here and talk as if Britain was an imperial nation bossing the rest of the world around, and using these ridiculous phrases about ‘Great this’ and ‘Great that’ – that’s not what it’s about,” he says. “What it is about is Britain, leading in the areas that we know about, and sharing and working with and making a future possible for all of us. Because what climate change tells us is that there’s either a future for all of us or there’s a future for none of us.”

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