Climate change – policy timeline

  • Following Mayer’s Joint Memorandum to House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology in 1975, the select committee accepted the recommendation and incorporated it into its final report.
  • In 1985, Abbey National Building Society adopts the energy conservation procedure recommended by Mayer, with its surveyors instructed to include a thermal rating measure in their surveys and recommendations on improvements to conserve energy in the surveyed home.
  • The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, says “Saving energy creates jobs”, quoted in Energy Management, October 1986.
  • Peter Walker, Secretary of State for Energy, publishes “a simple check list to determine the standard of energy efficiency” as a means for the house purchaser to check the energy efficiency of his home, quoted in Energy Management, 1987.
  • National Energy Foundation set up in 1990 to introduce a national home energy rating scheme and, in the same year, the UK Home Energy Labelling System.
  • The Department of the Environment announces in 1994 an energy rating scheme to indicate the energy cost of running new homes – Home Energy Audits – and a requirement that local authorities draw up energy conservation plans for residential buildings with a star-rated form of energy labelling.
  • The Conserver Gains Principle, further developed by David Fleming, Director of the Lean Institute, was cited in a European Commission document in September 1998 entitled “Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs) as an Instrument to Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions”. Since then, a considerable body of research on Personal Carbon Allowances and DTQs has been conducted at the Tyndall Centre, Manchester University and at the Environmental Research Centre, Oxford University.
  • Colin Challen, MP, sets up the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change (APPGCC) in 2005.
  • DEFRA Press Notice, 19 July 2006 describes how the Government is looking at Personal Carbon Allowances (PCAs) to combat rising domestic carbon emissions, with a new cross-departmental group set up to examine new policy options. The strategy was endorsed by David Miliband, when Secretary of State at DEFRA, at a meeting at the RSA in December 2006 and later when he was Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in December 2007. On both occasions, he referred to PCAs as a “new currency” and a means of benefiting people on low incomes as they would be able to sell their excess allowances.
  • Government introduces in 2007 a mandatory Energy Performance Certificate as part of its HIPs (Home Information Pack). This has to be produced when homes are bought or sold.
  • My passionate advocacy of the urgency with which action must be taken to avert climate catastrophe has been echoed by others including Sir John Houghton who described climate change as “a weapon of mass destruction”, and by the UK government’s chief scientist at the time, Sir David King, as a “more serious threat to world security than terrorism”.