Delivering Prosperity: Industrial Decarbonisation and the Just Transition

The UK Government has accepted the Committee on Climate Change’s advice on delivering a net zero carbon economy by 2050 (the Scottish Government by 2045), while the UK Industrial Strategy includes a ‘Grand Challenge’ to create the world’s first net-zero carbon industrial cluster by 2040 and at least one low-carbon cluster by 2030. The challenge lies in the fact that the UK’s regional industry clusters, generally centred around high value manufacturing, are key hubs of local economic activity and an important part of the UK economy that support important supply chains activity, including hundreds of thousands of jobs, that ripple out between and across regions. Delivering on low and net zero-carbon ambitions must be done in a way that does not make the costs of ‘doing business’ in the UK uncompetitive or even prohibitive, and in a way that the citizens of the UK understand and support.