Words by Dr Chantal Sullivan-Thomsett, Senior Research Associate
After Labour’s landslide victory, there was an audible sigh of relief from many environmental advocates. E3G, for example, deemed it a ‘super strong mandate for ambitious climate action and green investment’, with the party’s pledge to decarbonise the UK’s energy supply by 2030 a welcome ambition.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) recommended in its 2023 and 2024 progress reports that climate policy should: “[e]mpower people to make green choices by (…) changing car travel, home energy use and dietary behaviours and reducing air travel” (my emphasis). This is also echoed by work conducted across CAST showing that individual behaviour change will be key to reaching net zero.
Yet relatively little of the campaign was devoted to discussing these more hard-to-abate areas. Why was that? More to the point, was the need for green choices even reflected in the party manifestos? Did the major parties (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green, Reform, Scottish National Party [SNP] and Plaid Cymru) even address them?
Based on a close reading of them all, it’s a bit of a mixed picture.
Switching to electric vehicles
Across the manifestos, the most popular area for behaviour change was electric vehicles (EVs). These featured in all except Plaid Cymru’s. Reform was the outlier calling for ‘no more bans on petrol and diesel cars and no legal requirements for manufacturers to sell electric cars’. And whilst the SNP focused on introducing a phase-out of non-zero emission buses, every other manifesto pledged to phase out new petrol and diesel vehicles. Unlike the Conservatives, who committed to phase out internal combustion engines by 2035, Labour and the Lib Dems committed to phase out by 2030.
The Greens, however, went even further, wanting to see ‘all petrol and diesel vehicles replaced’ by EVs within a decade by bringing forward the phase out to 2027 and no more of these vehicles on the road by 2035. They explicitly referenced behaviour change: ‘it’s time to shift the transport system away from cars and roads’ by ‘restor[ing] the fuel duty escalator’ and then moving to road-pricing. Road pricing was a policy the Conservative Party vehemently opposed.
Reducing air travel
Few parties explicitly listed demand-management measures on aviation. Only Plaid Cymru, the Greens and the Lib Dems mentioned behaviour change in this area. Otherwise, references to aviation were reduced to a party’s support for Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SNP, Labour, Conservative), thereby sticking to the politically safer ground of changing energy supply rather than consumer demand.
Plaid Cymru’s commitments were modest, proposing to ‘increase Air Passenger Duty and kerosene tax for private jets’. The Green and Lib Dem manifestos showed a surprising amount of symmetry in this area. Both pledged to ban domestic flights where rail options were available; with the Greens banning flights for journeys that would take less than 3 hours by train, whereas the Lib Dems banned flights where a direct train of 2.5 hours was available. To nudge behaviour further, the Lib Dems also wanted airlines to reveal emissions (compared to the equivalent rail option) at the point of booking.
In terms of financial disincentives, the Lib Dems, albeit in vague terms, proposed to reform the taxation of international flights to focus on ‘those who fly the most’, thereby reducing costs for ‘ordinary households’ who take one or two international flights per year. Again, the Greens were more strident, pledging to introduce a Frequent Flyer Levy ‘for the 15% of people who take 70% of all flights’. The Conservatives explicitly ruled out a Frequent Flyer Levy.
Decarbonising home heating
In the area of heating – and heat pumps in particular – again the Lib Dems and Greens led the way.
The Greens wanted to reform planning to require all new-build homes to have heat pumps ‘or equivalent low carbon technologies’ and costed £9bn for installing ‘heating systems (e.g. heat pumps) for homes and other buildings’. For the Lib Dems free heat pumps for low-income households were a key part of their emergency ‘Home Energy Upgrade’ programme, as well as providing ‘incentives for installing heat pumps that cover the real costs’.
In line with their ‘pragmatic and proportionate approach to net zero’, the Conservatives promised that they will never be ‘forcing people to rip out their existing boiler and replace it with a heat pump’. The same commitment was echoed by Labour, albeit with no reference to heat pumps. In fact, Labour does not mention the technology at all, instead favouring the phrase ‘low-carbon heating’, perhaps learning from the experience of trying to accelerate low-carbon heating in Germany and the importance of providing consumers with choice.
Whilst low-carbon heating is mentioned by Labour, without more detail, it’s unclear exactly how and to what extent Labour will facilitate the increase in heat pumps and low-carbon heating within its £6.6bn ‘Warm Homes Plan’ and overcome the lack of consumer uptake as flagged by the National Audit Office.
Dietary changes
Evidence shows that reduced dairy and meat consumption reduces emissions. But the manifestos were silent on the matter. Even the Greens merely pledged to limit emissions by reducing meat and dairy production, rather than consumption.
Instead, parties mentioned food security (Labour, Reform, Conservative, Lib Dems, Greens), local produce (Labour, Reform, Conservative, Lib Dem, Plaid Cymru), food prices (Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Greens), food standards (Labour, Conservatives, Lib Dems), and the export potential of our food and drink industry (Conservatives, SNP, Lib Dems). But there were no explicit links made to emissions.
The mandate moving forward
Climate advocates know full well the importance of getting the hard-to-abate sectors into the political debate and keeping them there. But if, as previous research suggests, manifesto pledges profoundly shape future government policy, the state of the manifestos should give them pause for thought.
Whilst there is a clear political consensus over the need to shift people to EVs – with the debate focusing on how that is to be accomplished and by when, other hard-to-abate areas are lacking attention. The case for reducing air travel is not currently part of mainstream political debate in Great Britain; the Conservatives explicitly rejected such measures, and Labour did not mention it, nor is there detailed or clear leadership on how to ramp up household low-carbon heating from the two largest parties. More worryingly, changes to dietary behaviour are nowhere near mainstream political debate. No party, not even the Greens, could bring themselves to pledge on the matter.
Of course, five years is a long time in politics, so new policies may emerge as circumstances change and new crises or evidence emerges. But at the moment the mainstream political discourse is running well short of that mark.
With CAST now entering its new phase of research on how best to encourage behaviour change, it’s important not to overlook the important role that government – national, regional, and local – plays in shaping individuals’ choices.
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