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In a straightforward rejection of the central claim behind the government’s announcements in September 2023 of delays to key net zero targets – that the changes would save households money – the Climate Change Committee issued a response emphasising that the changes would in fact make net zero harder to achieve, as well as be more costly. Explore the Climate Barometer narrative thread on climate policies, public opinion and the costs of living here.
The Climate Change Committee wrote:
The cancellation of some Net Zero measures is likely to increase both energy bills and motoring costs for households – households who are also facing increasing impacts from climate change. Electric vehicles will be significantly cheaper than petrol and diesel vehicles to own and operate over their lifetimes, so any undermining of their roll-out will ultimately increase costs. The cancellation of regulations on the private-rented sector will lead to higher household energy bills
The government’s newly published Local Power Plan points the country in a direction that the British public support: clean energy that’s transparent, affordable, and delivers real benefits to communities and their local environments.
When we asked about the three most important factors for involving local communities on infrastructure proposals, both the public and MPs were most likely to select “clear, plain language information about the project and its impacts” and “being asked for views early, before decisions are made”. These were followed by “a clear explanation of how views influenced the final decision” for MPs and “independent or trusted organisations running the process” for the public.
When we asked which 3 factors people felt were most important in terms of influencing their support or opposition for local infrastructure projects, they picked: the project’s impact on the local environment, on energy bills and on the local community as the top considerations.
These three priorities are consistently the highest for all groups across age, gender, region, social grade, housing tenure, political support, education level, ethnicity, and whether they live in urban or rural areas; a rare point of alignment between these different subgroups of the public.
Strikingly, what made much less of a difference were people’s views about climate change and net zero.
This doesn’t mean that belief in (or concern about) climate change isn’t a critical foundation on which to build engagement around clean energy in general (this is the core idea behind linking the ‘how and the why’ on net zero, as we argued in our recent message testing work with Public First).
But when it comes to specific clean energy projects, the local impacts and financial considerations loom larger: as the transition becomes ever more place-based, this trend is only likely to accelerate.
Our tracker shows the enduring popularity of policies that also save on household bills (like installing insulation, or incentives to do so).
Although Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) get a bad rep, our tracker shows support outweighing opposition and support gently rising over the past three years.
One way to look at levels of policy support across the piece is that they’re really quite stable – but some are not stable in a good way. When it comes to sales of new gas boilers, and the phase out of sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles, opposition started to outpace support around 18 months ago, and this trend has (slowly) continued.
Signal in the Noise: Climate opinion trends for 2025/26
Signal in the Noise is Climate Barometer’s annual publication that monitors and makes sense of patterns and trends in opinion on climate change