Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Labour failing on climate change
The paper says that flooding, droughts and heatwaves are all increasing in severity due to climate breakdown, but current plans to protect people, land and infrastructure against extreme weather have been judged inadequate by Brown's committee, in a scathing assessment of the UK’s preparedness.
Lady Brown said: “We are seeing no change in activity from the new government, despite the fact that … it’s clear to the public that the current approach just isn’t working. The country is at risk, people are at risk, and there is not enough being done,” adding that it is frightening that the government is not taking seriously the rapidly increasing risk of flooding and is instead considering cuts to flood defences.
The Treasury has indicated that flood spending would not be ringfenced and could be reduced in the spending review in June.
Brown said: “If that means they’re thinking of cutting the money for resilience to flooding, we would ask them to think again. I can’t be clear enough about our message: we cannot wait to take action. This is not tomorrow’s problem. It’s today’s problem. And if we don’t do something about it, it will become tomorrow’s disaster.”
She pointed to floods in Valencia that killed 220 people in October and floods in Germany and Belgium in 2021 with similar numbers of deaths. “These are very close to home. These things could happen in the UK and we need government to recognise that this is the disaster that could be happening tomorrow and start to really take this seriously,” she said. “It is quite frightening that the evidence we’ve got shows that it isn’t yet.”
Without increased focus on making the UK’s infrastructure and economy more resilient to extreme weather, the impacts of the climate crisis could destroy about 7% of the UK’s GDP by 2050, the CCC found. This compares with a cost of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 of about 0.2% of GDP per year.
The CCC’s latest two-year assessment of the UK’s progress in adapting to climate change, published on Wednesday, found failure across every measure and every form of infrastructure, from transport and energy to communications. People’s health was being put at risk by the failure to adapt, the report found, and the natural environment was being damaged.
One in four properties will be at risk of flooding by 2050 unless urgent action is taken, up from about 6.3m properties today, the report found. More than a third of the railways and road networks are already at risk of flooding, which will rise to about half by 2050.
More than half of England’s top quality agricultural land is already at risk of flooding, and harvests like last year’s – the second worst for arable on record – could become more common.
Although many of the findings in the CCC assessment relate to measures taken under the previous government, Brown said that Labour was failing to respond to the threats. “We’re seeing no increase in action,” she said.
The Environment Agency warned last year that inflation was eating into flood defence budgets, meaning fewer people were being protected for the same expenditure. The National Audit Office warned of a quarter of new flood defence projects being abandoned.
Athough the current government may well be playing catch-up after the appalling record of the previous Tory government, they do need to act swiftly and decisively to try and mitigate the impact of climate change on our communities. However, their own watchdog doesn't think they are doing enough. Let's hope they sit up and take notice.
