Packham takes Government to court over net zero plans

CHRIS PACKHAM has been granted permission for a judicial review of the Government’s decision to reverse some of its green policies.

The naturalist and TV presenter challenged a decision announced by Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, to water down moves aimed at helping to reduce the UK’S emissions to zero by 2050, in a policy known as net zero.

Mr Sunak announced the rollback, which included delaying a ban on the sale of new diesel and petrol cars from 2030 to 2035, reducing the phasing out of gas boilers from 100% to 80% by 2035, and scrapping the requirement for homes’ energy efficiency to be upgraded, in September.

The Prime Minister said the UK’S approach to net zero was imposing “unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families”.

Leigh Day, a law firm that is representing Mr Packham, announced that permission for the legal challenge had been granted by Mr Justice Eyre. the law firm added that a judge would decide whether ministers had acted lawfully and a date for a court hearing would be announced later this year.

Measures and a timetable to introduce the policies were laid out in a Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP) put before Parliament in March 2023.

It was delivered after a legal challenge by Friends of the Earth argued that the Government’s Net Zero Strategy did not include the required details of how the UK would reach its legally binding targets by 2050.

The Leigh Day team will argue that after the decision was announced, Mr Sunak did not confirm whether the Government would be able to meet its sixth carbon budget or how it would do so, as required by the 2008 Climate Change Act.

Mr Packham would also say it was not lawful for the Government to remove key policies from the CBDP without having others in place to ensure targets would be met, Leigh Day added.

The case also alleges that when making the decision to water down the policies, the Government failed to take mandatory and relevant considerations into account, including its impact on the achievement of the carbon budgets and the net zero target and advice from the Climate Change Committee.

Mr Packham will also argue there was a failure to consult the public and key stakeholders before the policies were abandoned.

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesman said: “We strongly reject these claims and will be robustly defending this challenge.”