Our two wins against previous UK governments have produced a new climate plan for the country

What we like about it: 

• The government delivered the plan by the Court-ordered deadline (with an extension) 

• The government says it has now fully taken risk into account regarding its emissions projections - a key requirement of the High Court’s judgment 

• There appears to be a real focus on job creation and lowering bills 

• ...As seen in the commitment to funding the Warm Homes Plan and community energy, as well as doubling clean energy jobs to 800,000 

• There is a focus on nature-based solutions including tree planting, peatland restoration and support for more sustainable agriculture 

We still have concerns around certain areas: 

• It appears that substantial amounts of public money and government support will still be channeled into high-risk climate solutions like CCS, hydrogen, ‘sustainable aviation fuel’ and bioenergy  

• This diverts support away from proven solutions that will work at scale and deliver high-impact benefits for people and planet, like public transport and home insulation  

• There’s an assumption that AI will play a part in meeting emissions targets, but this doesn’t seem to account for the energy and water demand of megascale data centres 

• At first look, we were encouraged by signs that point to the overall credibility of the plan and pleased that our Court judgment appears to have driven this.  

We’ll be analysing the plan in more detail in the coming weeks. 

In January 2022 we submitted a landmark climate case to the High Court, arguing that the then-government's climate plan was inadequate, and failed to meet the basic requirements of the 2008 Climate Change Act.  

After the case was granted permission to proceed in March 2022, we teamed up with Friends of the Earth and Good Law Project, who had submitted similar cases, for a full hearing in the High Court where our claims were heard together.  

During the hearing, we argued that the government had failed to show that its policies will reduce emissions sufficiently to meet its legally binding carbon budgets - targets which limit the total amount of greenhouse gases that the UK can emit over five-year periods on the road to net zero. 

We also argued that the climate plan failed to include enough information about the policies and their expected effects to allow Parliament and the public to properly scrutinise them. 

We said that these failings meant the UK government had breached its legal duties under the Climate Change Act.  

After the hearing in 2022, the High Court ruled that the government’s climate plan was indeed in breach of the Climate Change Act, and ordered the government to revise it. A new strategy – the ‘Carbon Budget Delivery Plan’ –  was delivered in March 2023. 

However, we still thought the revised strategy was inadequate and failed to meet core requirements of the Climate Change Act. We challenged the government in the High Court again in 2023, where we argued:   

• The strategy didn’t adequately address the very real risks that many of its key policies won’t deliver the cuts needed to meet the government’s legally-binding climate targets.  

• The Minister lacked sufficient information on the level of risk of delivery of the plans when they were approved.  

• The plan stated that many of the future technologies it relies on to deliver emissions reductions are high risk, while many of the proposals are vague and uncertain, which raised serious questions about whether or not the emissions reductions will be achieved in full, as the plan assumed. 

So we launched a second case.  

Alongside our partners, in February 2024 we went back to Court against the government, and the Court once again ruled in our favour, ordering the government to produce another revised plan. 

The government initially had 12 months to deliver this after the High Court's ruling in May 2024.

However, July 2024 saw a change of government following the general election, and the new government were granted an extension to the deadline in March 2025.