Why the Civil Service Won't Give Up Net Zero Lightly

For many years, Net Zero has been a bipartisan project in the UK. Since the election, the consensus is breaking up, with the emboldened Reform party basically opposed and the Conservatives making many more sceptical noises.

Keir Starmer has, in Ed Miliband, put a true believer in the cabinet and has made net zero one of the six government ‘missions’ - ‘Make Britain a clean energy superpower’ as well as providing a matching ‘milestone’ (Securing home-grown energy, protecting billpayers, and putting us on track to at least 95% clean power by 2030, while accelerating the UK to net zero).

In theory, this makes Net Zero look like a higher priority than stopping illegal and reducing legal migration, which don’t rate either a ‘mission’ or a ‘milestone’. It’s hard to believe this reflects the real priorities of Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, however, particularly as the Office of Budget Responsibility continues to pile on gloomy noises about the future cost of the renewable energy obligations we are already committed to. Keir Starmer was noticeably the only major world leader to attend the Azerbaijan COP conference, while the business papers are full of the decline of interest in ESG particularly in the US. Morgan Stanley left the Net Zero Banking Alliance yesterday, following Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo in recent weeks.

A reversal of policy looks highly unlikely. If the economy continues to flatline and the cost of living crisis get worse, the temptation to delay and temporise will grow, however.

What would happen then, however, would be growing tension between politicians and the official machine. Speaking as someone who recently left the civil service after over 30 years, it is hard to overstate how much the machine is committed to, and locked into the current Net Zero trajectory, and how resistant it would be to change. This cultural commitment is also something that needs to be taken carefully into account by anyone looking at government analysis or even data.

The culture that has grown up in the civil service around this issue differs sharply from the traditional approach, gently satirised in Yes Minister, in which Sir Humphrey rebukes Bernard’s suggestion that ‘if it’s our job to carry out government’s policies, shouldn’t we believe in them?’ with a masterclass of the traditional Whitehall attitude.

“What an extraordinary idea… I have served 11 governments in the last 30 years. If I had believed all their policies I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to getting into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel – and of denationalising it – and of renationalising it. On capital punishment, I would have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I would have been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, but above all I would have been a stark raving staring schizophrenic”

This was always one of the parts of being a civil servant that people found oddest. I was always being asked how difficult it is have to implement policies that we might strongly disagree with. In practice, I have always explained that the overwhelming majority of government policy isn’t particularly controversial – and even when it is, civil servants are usually temperamentally able to see both sides of the argument. In the relatively few areas where people might feel strongly personally engaged, it has usually been possible to slip away when people saw a really radical shift coming, and quietly move somewhere else rather than implement policies we would find really uncongenial. Because fundamental to civil servants’ understanding of their role was a recognition that Ministers have a mandate, and we do not.

I’m not sure this attitude is as central as it used to be, however. Gus O’Donnell, as Cabinet Secretary, pushed hard his idea of ‘Four Ps’ ‘Pride, Passion, Pace and Professionalism’. While standard management speak in one sense, there is something jarring about demanding ‘passion’ given that Ministers change and policies may change with them, and requiring someone to be passionate in opposite directions takes us back to Sir Humphrey and his ‘schizophrenia’.

In recent years, this drift towards seeing civil servants as ‘activists’ has been reflected in adverts of the fast stream that stress the opportunity to work in policy areas thought likely to be attractive and meaningful to candidates, rather than stressing the central role of service to the democratically accountable government.

Nowhere is this stronger than in departments like the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero which leads on this. Civil servants working on these policies are overwhelmingly enthusiasts. Indeed, there has been quite a pattern in DESNZ and its predecessors to imply in job adverts that this is a pre-requisite for the job. Adverts for senior roles have even stressed in the candidate description the importance of a ‘passion’ for Net Zero.

A second factor in the departmental culture is the relatively high degree of interchange between government and the private sector. This is exactly what successive civil service reform reports have called for, and it has indeed brought in some highly able people, including several members of the current departmental board.

It does have a flip side, however. It leads to some incentives that differ from the way the senior civil service typically used to operate. People from business who choose to join the civil service, probably at a significant pay cut, are likely to do so because they are particularly committed to the policy that is currently being pursued. They probably feel they will not stay if the policy develops in a direction they aren’t comfortable with. With prior private sector experience combined with their work in the heart of government, they are able to find private sector jobs on the way out, often consulting or advising on net zero matters.

The incentives also change for some career civil servants. Given the extraordinary influence government policy in this area has on business strategies across a huge range of sectors, there are many more opportunities than usual to leverage experience working in this area in private sector roles. Industry are not looking for mavericks, but for those with a clear understanding of the direction of government policy and ideally continuing good relations with those in the department. Very senior former departmental figures are now working in various consultancy roles promoting Net Zero work.

The third important cultural factor to take into account is the significant weight civil servants put on the law, reinforced here by the unusual way that successive Ministers have set out policy objectives in legislation, thus binding their and their successors’ hands. Nothing can be more appealing temperamentally to civil servants, who are frustrated by policy shifts driven by what they see as short term political priorities, and prefer working to a longer term orderly and rules based plan insulated from political pressure. Officials pointing to the clear legal duties set by the statutory plan help explain the behaviour of past Secretaries of State who veered from appearing to condemn aspects of their own policy, while signing up to successive massive further investments.

This strong cultural predisposition to support the policy combines with a real risk of group think given the people Ministers and officials are largely interacting with day to day. Sceptics of climate change policies are regarded with intense suspicion. Civil servants are temperamentally keen to work with ‘stakeholders’, but in this area these consist of lobbying groups; academia (overwhelmingly supportive of action), sectors of business who see business opportunities in net zero, and others who face costs but are likely to want to walk carefully to get the best deal for themselves as a result. None of this is likely to promote a vigorous and diverse exchange of views.

This poses a real risk to the quality of the analysis and the extent to which it is properly stress tested. The sheer scale of the plan also means that individuals are less likely to have sufficient oversight of the whole to spot that the plan as a whole is at risk. Civil servants tend to work in a pretty siloed way. Net Zero is a mammoth project, with 13 main delivery areas and 33 outputs beneath that. The civil service teams responsible for every area will be aware of the weaknesses and risks in their own area, but are much less likely to know the extent to which these are generally replicated.

Even for the relatively small number who have that sort of oversight, there is the comfort of the cover from statutory status of Net Zero, as well as the inherent uncertainties in costing the risks of climate change. Most of the officials will believe there is at least a chance of catastrophic outcomes from climate change, relatively small changes to the way these are assessed could make a big difference to the cost benefit of abatement measures. This makes it easier to rationalise continuing with existing policies even in the face of continually escalating costs.

This commitment to the policy will generally be reflected in expert advisory groups. Civil servants have tidy minds and do not much like expert groups that disagree with eachother at the best of time. They are even less likely to tolerate disruption from characters who might be seen as ‘climate deniers’. So it is reasonable to assume that the expert advice received comes within a pretty narrow band of views (the Policy Exchange paper I co-wrote sets out some ideas for tackling this problem more widely).

Those expecting a vigorous internal debate driving up the quality of departmental analysis also need to understand the perverse incentives posed by Freedom of Information legislation. Ministers have never been that keen on publishing information that undermines their own policies. But Freedom of Information means even conducting the analysis privately in house becomes highly risky. Tony Blair famously regretted passing this legislation, believing it dampened frankness within government and simply provided ammunition to outsiders with a vested interest. There are various exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act which allow material to be withheld. But in practice they hardly ever apply to the sort of analytical work backing up policy.

What this means in turn is that officials will be extremely reluctant to commission or conduct work which might have unpredictable outcomes – for example calling into question the viability or desirability of core Net Zero objectives.

There is a lively debate going on about the real operating costs of wind farms for example, with Net Zero Watch claiming the capital and operating costs extracted from business’ accounts are much higher than those assumed by the department, calling into question the department’s forecasts about the Levelized Cost of Energy, and hence the future trajectory of energy bills. I am pretty sure that officials in DESNZ would be very reluctant to carry out any formal work to examine , refute or replicate this analysis, lest the internal work match the NZW figures and they be forced to publish this in response to FOI. This does mean that dissenting information is less likely to be collected and fed into the system, amplifying further the existing group think.

I should stress there is a strong sense of integrity among government analysts, statisticians and researchers. They will not publish material they think is wrong. As the path to deliver net zero becomes progressively more difficult, however, officials will have to rely on shaping the assumptions they feed into their models to deliver outputs which are broadly compatible with the government’s statutory objectives. These assumptions will be stated and testing them is much more important than the details or the output of the models they inform.

There are early signs of triumphalism in some climate sceptic quarters that the tide has turned on this subject. Given the cultural mindset described here and the legal and technical difficulties unwinding the existing policy, which I will cover in a later note, the tanker could take a lot longer to turn than some are hoping