Mike Reader MP: the UK's Seventh Carbon Budget is an anti-poverty measure

Done well, the transition to net zero is one of the most powerful anti-poverty strategies at our disposal.

This month, the government set out the Seventh Carbon Budget. In line with the Climate Change Committee’s advice, it sets a legal limit on CO₂ that’s roughly an 87% cut on 1990 levels.

It’s progressive, ambitious, and the next staging post on the road to net zero by 2050.

What is the carbon budget?

Carbon budgets are how the Climate Change Act turns a distant target into something we can plan around.

Like any good performance specification, they define what success looks like and by when, giving industry, government, and households the certainty to act.

Each budget caps emissions over a five-year period, set roughly 12 years ahead, to give us time to plan. This latest budget covers 2038 to 2042.

Parliament will debate the budget this month and must vote on whether to pass it into law by 30 June.

The net zero consensus is fraying

The UK met its first three carbon budgets and is on course to meet the fourth, which runs until 2027. But beyond that, it’s widely expected that we’ll start to really struggle.

The path forward requires bold decisions that may not achieve the cross-party support the net zero agenda has enjoyed in the past.

The consensus that carried earlier budgets is fraying. Net zero is increasingly used as a political tool, pegged as a luxury we can’t afford, a cost loaded onto struggling families to fix a problem they didn’t create.

I want to make the opposite case.

Depending on fossil fuels hits the lowest-income households hardest

The fossil-fuel driven status quo creates and intensifies poverty. Households in the UK owe nearly £4.5 billion in energy debt, sitting disproportionately with the lowest earning third of the country.

Gas sets the wholesale price of electricity most of the time, meaning every global shock, whether war in Ukraine or an extreme weather event, pushes more people into fuel poverty. Our exposure to fossil fuels isn’t just an environmental problem, it’s a poverty problem.

This is why decarbonising the power system matters.

Energy costs hit lower-income households the hardest, with them spending close to 15% of their income on energy, compared with under 7% overall.

Clean, home-grown power that doesn’t answer to the gas market is, over time, cheaper and more stable.

The route out of fuel poverty is already visible in the data. The number of households in fuel poverty in England fell to 2.36 million in 2025, driven by better energy efficiency, with 65% of low-income homes now rated EPC band C or above.

Net zero also supports economic growth

There is a growth story here, too. New analysis confirms the net zero economy generates around £105 billion a year and supports 1.1 million jobs, with wages 11% above the national average.

Net zero activity makes its biggest relative contribution to Scotland, Yorkshire and Humber, Wales, and the East Midlands, my own region.

For once, investment and high-value jobs are being felt in places that decades of industry decline left behind.

This is what good infrastructure does. It rebalances.

An engineering challenge as well as a policy challenge

I won’t pretend the transition will automatically benefit everyone.

Upfront costs for heat pumps, electric vehicles, and retrofits fall hardest on those who can least afford them, which is why the government prioritises support for low-income households.

Clean power is cheaper to produce. But without unlinking gas and electricity pricing, and without shifting network costs, policy levies, and legacy debt to general taxation, bills won’t disappear on their own.

And the engineering challenge is formidable: upgrading 29 million homes, reinforcing the grid, and building out electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure.

It’s one of the largest built environment programmes this country has ever undertaken. Getting the design and delivery right matter as much as the political will.

Engineers have a role to play in designing our energy, transport, and built infrastructure with whole-life costs and users in mind, so we don’t burden future generations with excessive costs.

It’s time for leadership

The Seventh Carbon Budget gives industry certainty that the UK will continue its path to net zero by 2050.

For the engineering sector, that certainty is what makes it possible to build supply chains, develop new materials and methods, and train the next generation of specialists.

Without it, investment stalls. Hesitating or watering down the budget would tell investors and families alike that Britain has lost its nerve.

The industry is ready to play its part. The economic case stacks up. The anti-poverty case makes this an endeavour everyone should get behind.

We now need Parliament to provide leadership and recognise that getting to net zero, done fairly, is how we make this country more equal, not less.

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