Select committee: Environmental Audit Committee
Recommendation 15
8th Report - The Seventh Carbon Budget
Published 4 Mar 2026
Environmental Audit Committee The Seventh Carbon Budget All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
Alongside the draft Seventh Carbon Budget Order, the Government should publish draft sector delivery plans setting out how each sector is expected to contribute to delivery of the budget. These plans should: • Set out the policy instruments that will be used and when they will take effect; • Identify the funding routes, including the balance between public support and private investment; • Specify the infrastructure required, with indicative sequencing and delivery milestones to ensure that grid expansion, planning reform and infrastructure readiness precede electrification and deployment surges; • Set out the behavioural, skills and capacity assumptions underpinning delivery; • Demonstrate how the sectoral plans align with each other and with wider Government strategies and policy frameworks, such as those affecting land use, infrastructure, industrial strategy and skills; • Explain how competing demands across sectors for constrained resources, including clean power, grid capacity, skilled workers, land and sustainable feedstocks, will be prioritised and managed, and how trade-offs between departmental objectives will be resolved to support delivery of the carbon budget as a whole. 60 • Set out how projected growth in electricity demand from data centres and other emerging energy-intensive sectors is factored into system planning and infrastructure delivery, including the implications for low-carbon generation, network capacity, and competing demands across the economy; • and, for sectors reliant on emerging or nascent technologies it should include pre-agreed contingency options and clearly defined and actively monitored trigger points to be activated if technologies are not delivered at the expected pace or scale. This should include explicit consideration of delivery capacity and skills constraints, to avoid poor implementation that could undermine public confidence. Together, these plans would strengthen Parliamentary scrutiny, provide greater transparency on
From: Environmental Audit Committee, 8th Report - The Seventh Carbon Budget (HC 1327), 4 March 2026
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 11 June 2026 (deadline 4 May 2026).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government will propose that the seventh carbon budget is set at the Climate Change Committee's recommended 535 MtCO₂e, accepts two parliamentary debate recommendations, and otherwise says it will consider the Committee's delivery recommendations when it prepares the delivery plan.
- On parliamentary scrutiny, the government "accepts" that the draft Order should be debated on the Floor of the House rather than in a Delegated Legislation Committee, and accepts a debate of not less than half a day, working with Business Managers.
- It will publish a CB7 delivery plan "as soon as reasonably practicable" after Parliament decides the budget level, rather than alongside the draft Order, and will "consider" Parliament's views when preparing it.
- On an annual oral ministerial statement on delivery progress, the government says it "will consider whether seeking an oral statement would also be beneficial".
- On international aviation emissions, the government states that on 14 April 2026 it laid a statutory instrument to include the UK's share of international aviation and shipping emissions in Carbon Budget 6, later budgets and the net zero target.