• Breaching the 0.7% international aid target: a case study in legislative failure, Ruth Fox, Hansard Society blog, 3 March 2025

• How does Parliament approve Government spending? A procedural guide to the Estimates process, Hansard Society

• Delivering a Net Zero Economy, Toby Perkins’ speech at the Public Policy Projects Climate Breakfast event, 26 November 2024

• Comment by Toby Perkins on the Climate Change Committee’s Report on meeting the Seventh Carbon Budget, 26 February 2025

• Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, Correspondence with Pat McFadden MP, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, January-March 2025

• Centre for Research Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), Serbia

• Simon Hart, Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip (Pan Macmillan, 2025)

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. Coming up this week

Ruth Fox: Parliament's net zero enforcer tells us how he intends to make sure the government sticks to its plans to decarbonise Britain.

Mark D'Arcy: A row over the National Security Advisor.

The government's refusing to let him give evidence to, um, Parliament's National Security Committee.

Ruth Fox: MPs stuck in a brothel at 2am. Tantrums from sacked ministers. And chaos in the voting lobbies. Rishi Sunak's Chief Whip tells us why he published his diaries of parliamentary mayhem.[00:01:00]

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, it's probably the most important document you've never heard of. The Carbon Budget, the seventh incarnation indeed of Britain's carbon budget, was published at the end of February. And this is a document that sets out the path to getting net zero in Britain. How we can cut our carbon emissions in power generation, in transport, in heating our homes, It even suggests that we should be cutting our consumption of meat and dairy.

So it's a document that has vast ramifications across the whole spectrum of British industry. The last time such a document was published, Parliament almost ratified it with a flick of the wrist with startlingly little debate. This time, there are hopes that it will be much more extensively explored, not least because it has such a huge impact right across the breadth of this country's economic activity.

And someone with a direct interest in that is Toby Perkins, the Labour MP who chairs the Environmental Audit [00:02:00] Select Committee. We went to speak to him in Parliament and he started by telling us exactly what it is that his committee does.

Toby Perkins: The Environmental Audit Committee has a unique role. It's across government.

Every single government department has a select committee that shadows it and then we have two non governmental department select committees. One is the Public Accounts Committee that effectively audits the money. And we are the sort of environmental equivalent of that, looking at right across government, are departments who maybe don't think the environment is their major responsibility, actually complying with the legal commitments that the government has on the environment.

So we assess the environmental performance of the government across all departments, and particularly looking at things like carbon budgets and the impact on our constituents of the decisions government are taking.

Mark D'Arcy: And this is quite an important period for you because the Climate Change Committee, which advises on how the UK should respond to climate change, has just [00:03:00] published its seventh carbon budget, CB7, in the jargon, which is quite an interesting document.

It envisages very substantial changes to the way we live. We'd consume less meat, we'd consume less dairy, we'd mostly have electric cars, our homes would be heated by heat pumps, all sorts of things like that, as well as big reductions in emissions elsewhere to get the UK towards its target of net zero.

Your committee's got the job of acting as kind of enforcer for that.