One year of Labour: a carbon snapshot

One year ago, Labour’s manifesto promised a cleaner energy supply and energy efficient homes. Progress since then has included lifting the ban on onshore wind farms in England and pledging £9.4 billion for carbon capture, usage and storage projects.

These green shoots are undeniably promising, but investment focus and regulatory support for construction’s decarbonisation seem forgotten.

Reflecting on Labour’s first year back in control, BCIS’s executive director, James Fiske, digs into Labour’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions and more importantly, what’s next?

Embodied vs operational carbon. Has Labour struck the right balance?

The UK has a creaking grid, a reliance on fossil fuels, and a built environment that’s generating a significant volume of carbon emissions, primarily through the use and maintenance of it. I don’t blame Labour for tackling operational carbon and cleaning up UK energy first.

Addressing operational carbon is also simpler than managing embodied carbon. You can measure how much energy is being used to heat a building, for instance, and therefore regulate operational carbon more readily. Labour’s £13.2 billion investment in the Warm Homes Plan over the current Spending Review period makes sense when you consider its wider goals for housebuilding and infrastructure growth.

Embodied carbon – the emissions generated from the manufacture, transport, construction, maintenance and eventual demolition of materials – is a different beast entirely and much harder to calculate. What’s needed is a shift to whole life carbon thinking. Developing policy and legislation around a mandatory carbon standard for all new projects would go a long way to cutting emissions as whole.

Can Labour meet its infrastructure pledges and net zero commitment?

Growing sustainably is a vast obstacle in the context of infrastructure, the economy and society. The UK is grinding to a standstill, and we need to build to overcome stagflation.

Understandably, Labour’s manifesto did not make any grand claims to accelerate infrastructure growth in a way that directly supports net zero. It’s hard to achieve and the government is more interested in driving the clean energy transition, evident in the £14.2 billion package for Sizewell C and commitment to doubling business investment in clean energy industries by 2035.

Yet the huge embodied carbon cost of solar panels retrofit and establishing green infrastructure generally cannot be ignored. While building at scale without emissions is near impossible, enforcing the assessment and limitation of embodied carbon in projects is not.

Historically, we’ve seen successful embodied carbon reduction processes in the infrastructure community. The water sector is just one example. Refusing to mandate a similar approach, either through the planning system or building regulations, would go directly against Labour’s commitment to reach net zero.

How might Labour support better carbon reporting?

Investing in data and standardising assessments is crucial. For instance, the main source of carbon data for materials captured in the Built Environment Carbon Database comes from Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). However, it’s become clear that EPDs are not regulated strongly enough, which results in data quality issues.

A common example is the reporting of carbon numbers for the same type of material using different units of measure. This makes analysing the data more complex than it needs to be – a problem that does not exist when using BCIS’s Life Cycle Evaluator. Standardising EPDs at a regulatory level would help to reduce such issues by ensuring mandatory fields are completed.

The price tag of EPDs is a big barrier too. Product manufacturers are looking at paying up to £15,000 to produce one EPD. This is a real problem for smaller manufacturers in particular. Investment in developing a tool that can produce EPDs at a lower cost could improve data consistency and carbon insights.

What should stricter embodied carbon regulations look like?

The aim should be to make carbon assessing as simple as possible. Mapping the requirements of whole life carbon assessments (WLCAs) in policy, mandating carbon assessments in planning or building regulations, and investing in tools and training that empower people to collect and use data easily, must be the first ports of call.

Several European countries are already leagues ahead. INIES, France’s national reference database on environmental and health data for construction products and equipment, is a prime example.

The database is supported by regulation that maintains consistent data, which includes obligating manufacturers to produce an environmental declaration using a standard calculation method⁽¹⁾. The benefits of replicating a similar system in the UK could be a game-changer for understanding our embodied carbon output more explicitly.

What next?

One year in, Labour must now recognise the need for a whole life carbon approach to growth. With its Infrastructure Pipeline on the cusp of release and due to be updated every six months, there is an opportunity to introduce a carbon standard that would shape greener development.

Now is the moment for action. Only time will tell if Labour steps up to the carbon mantle.

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One year of Labour

More commentary on the government’s first year in power:

One year of Labour: housing figures show work to do

One year of Labour: BCIS chief economist says government is ‘turning a corner’

One year of Labour: an infrastructure snapshot

One year of Labour: an economic snapshot

^{(1) INIES – 4 News – Foire aux questions – here}