By Bob Ward
Kemi Badenoch this week announced that the Conservative Party would repeal the Climate Change Act of 2008 if they win a majority at the next General Election, due by August 2029.
This announcement, made through an interview in The Spectator magazine, follows a similar statement in February that under her leadership the Conservatives would abandon the statutory target, contained in the emended Climate Change Act, requiring annual emissions of greenhouse gases from the United Kingdom to be reduced to ‘net zero’.
Ms Badenoch, the official Leader of Opposition, did not provide any analysis to support her new decision, and her announcement was accompanied by many false claims, both in the quotations attributed to her and the text of the article, as well as in accompanying coverage in The Daily Telegraph.
The article in The Spectator stated: “The Act mandates targets to hit net zero by 2050, which leads, Badenoch warns, to higher costs.” This assertion is not supported by the evidence. The most recent analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), published in July 2025 , shows that for the ‘balanced pathway’ laid out by the Climate Change Committee in its recommendations for the Seventh Carbon Budget, the total net cost to the economy of reaching net zero emissions would be 116 billion between 2025 and 2050, an average of 4.46 billion per year – see Figure 1.
Figure 1. Estimates of the whole-economy costs and savings of the balanced pathway put forward by...
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