We’ve Been Granted Judicial Review

Exciting news! We’ve won the next stage in our challenge to the Prime Minister and the Ministers of Energy Security & Net Zero and Transport over their rolling back of Net Zero policies. That’s right, we’re taking the UK government to court.

A judge will now decide whether it was unlawful for the Secretaries of State for Energy and Transport to decide to abandon the Government’s timetable to phase out petrol and diesel powered cars and vans, gas boilers, off-grid fossil fuel domestic heating, and minimum energy ratings for rented homes.

We have been given the go-ahead to argue three grounds in court;

• The duty of the Government to have policies in place to ensure it can meet its commitments under the Climate Change Act is a continuing one. 
• When taking the decision to abandon the policies, the Government failed to take mandatory and relevant considerations into account, including the impact of the decision on the achievement of the carbon budgets and the net zero target and advice from the Climate Change Committee (CCC). 
• There was a failure to consult the public and key stakeholders before abandoning the policies.

The pledges which the government abandoned were important parts of the UKs plan to reach Net Zero in order to ameliorate the effects of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss which threaten life on our planet. Notably they, unlike some of the other parts of that strategy, were actually quantifiable, they were directly measurable in terms of carbon management . To abandon them without having comparable quantifiable measures in place was reckless 

We’ll have more news about this case as it progresses later in 2024 – but for now, watch our update video below.