Net Zero and National Security: How can Parliament hold the Government to account?

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Net Zero and National Security: How can Parliament hold the Government to account? - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 78

7 Mar 2025

The Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, Toby Perkins MP, and the UK National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell. © UK Parliament, ©CC BY-SA 3.0

How will Parliament hold the Government accountable for its Net Zero commitments? With the Climate Change Committee publishing its recommendations for the Seventh Carbon Budget, we talk to Toby Perkins MP, Chair of Parliament’s Net Zero watchdog, the Environmental Audit Committee. We also explore the Government’s controversial decision to block National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell from testifying before Parliament. Finally, Simon Hart, former Chief Whip, shares revelations from his political diaries and warns that parties must better prepare MPs for the pressures of modern politics.

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In this episode, we sit down with Toby Perkins MP, Chair of Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee, to discuss how he and his colleagues plan to hold the Government accountable for its ambitious Net Zero commitments.

The Government’s advisory body, the Climate Change Committee, has now recommended emissions reductions for the Seventh Carbon Budget (2038-2042) — the next milestone in achieving Net Zero by 2050. Ministers must decide how much of this advice to adopt before presenting a legally binding carbon budget to Parliament for approval. Yet, in 2021, MPs spent just 17 minutes debating the Sixth Carbon Budget Order, a move later criticised by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for its lack of scrutiny. With Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband now leading the Government, how will parliamentary oversight of climate policy change? Will MPs take their role more seriously this time?

We also examine an escalating dispute between the Government and Parliament’s National Security Committee. The Government has refused to allow Jonathan Powell, the new National Security Adviser (NSA), to give evidence to the Committee and has stopped sharing National Security Council (NSC) agendas — breaking a decade-long tradition of confidential engagement. Every NSA since 2010 has testified before Parliament, yet Ministers now argue Powell is a special adviser, not an official, and should not be subject to scrutiny. Critics, however, warn that this move weakens transparency and parliamentary oversight at a time of heightened public concern over defence and security. Matt Western MP, Chair of the NSC, argues that restricting access to the NSA could leave Parliament in the dark on key national security decisions.

Finally, we speak to Simon Hart, former Conservative MP and Chief Whip, about his newly published political diaries—packed with eyebrow-raising revelations, from Ministers getting stuck in brothels at 2am to tantrums from sacked colleagues. But beyond the scandalous anecdotes, Hart delivers a serious message: political parties need to improve candidate selection, manage MPs’ expectations, and ensure future politicians are mentally resilient enough to handle the intense pressures of modern political life.

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Our guests

Toby Perkins MP

Toby Perkins has been the Labour Member of Parliament for Chesterfield in Derbyshire since 2010. He was elected Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee of the House of Commons in September 2024, having previously been Shadow Defra Minister for Nature and Rural Affairs until the 2024 general election.

Simon Hart

Simon Hart was the Conservative Member of Parliament for Caerfyrddin from 2010 to 2024, serving as the Government Chief Whip from 2022 to 2024 under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and as Secretary of State for Wales from 2019 to 2022. He recently published a book - Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip - providing an account of his time as Chief Whip.

Resources

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)

Transcript

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.

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