Recommendation 9

We asked what the Department was doing to ensure that it would be able to track progress towards net zero when responsibility was shared across departments. The Department told us that the new coordination structures provided it with clarity on total emissions and the level of emissions for which each department has responsibility. It asserted that this meant each department could be held to account for its area of responsibility while the Department was overall accountable for total emissions. It also explained that departments would be set an overall emissions ‘envelope’, which all emissions related to their policy decisions must come in under and that this envelope would fall over time. The Department acknowledged that it needed to enhance its reporting on the different net zero delivery programmes across government and told us that it had tasked a net zero governance team to work on this issue.14 The Treasury told us that the Department was working with the Climate Change Committee (CCC) to develop measures that could be used to track progress. It explained, however, that it would take ‘some time’ to develop this and make sure that it was designed and implemented in the right way, but that it hoped to improve the data and information available to make policy and spending decisions this year.15