Original article by Ethan Shone republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Oil and gas firms were able to water down or change Conservative policies without scrutiny, new report finds

The British government weakened key climate policies after fossil fuel giants lobbied ministers and used legal loopholes to avoid public scrutiny, a new report has found.

Climate-focused think tank InfluenceMap has uncovered that industry influence appears to have led to the delay and dilution of UK policies on the roll-out of heat pumps, the development of ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel and the granting of new oil and gas licenses.

In each case, it found that lobbyists representing fossil fuel actors that stood to lose billions from progressive climate regulations were able to influence the Conservative government’s policy without scrutiny.

While InfluenceMap’s report looks at policies relating to the UK’s net-zero ambitions, its findings on the way the UK’s lax laws allow lobbying to be conducted in secret can be applied across sectors. The think tank is calling for reforms to address this and close the “major transparency gap”.

The secrecy around lobbying, which has been at the heart of many government scandals in recent years, is a major driver of the disillusionment in British politics.

Three-quarters of the public believe the government is “rigged to serve the rich and influential”, according to polling conducted by More in Common and University College London’s Policy Lab last year.

InfluenceMap’s findings illustrate “how inadequate and opaque lobbying rules undermine effective policymaking”, said Alastair McCapra, the CEO of the UK lobbying industry body.

He added: “Business engagement should help to build sounder policy with better outcomes for the public, but unaccountable lobbying breeds public mistrust. This important report removes the guesswork needed to piece together what kind of lobbying is taking place.”

Weak lobbying laws

openDemocracy has previously reported extensively on the ways that the UK’s weak lobbying laws allow corporate influence to secretly shape policy.

Our investigations have now been backed up by InfluenceMap, which has found a huge gap exists between the lobbying that takes place and that which is disclosed. This means the British public often has no way of knowing who is swaying policy.

Comparing transparency rules in the UK, the European Parliament, the US, Canada and France, InfluenceMap found that the UK has by far the worst system.

Of the five, only the UK exempts lobbyists who work in-house for a company, rather than for an agency or consultancy, from registering with a statutory lobbying watchdog. Less than 15% of lobbyists working in the UK need to register because of this rule.

The firms on the register must publish a list of clients on whose behalf they have lobbied each quarter. But they do not have to publish any details about the lobbying, including whether it involved written correspondence or a meeting and what legislation or policy was discussed.

Registered lobbyists also only need to declare clients for whom they lobbied government ministers and senior officials. There is no requirement to name clients when they approached other MPs and peers, including those on select committees, or influential government advisers.

The Committee for Standards in Public Life, an independent public body that advises the prime minister on lobbying and other aspects of public office, has consistently recommended the government publish a single, searchable database of all meetings with lobbyists.

Its recommendations would expand the scope of the current register considerably, requiring lobbyists to disclose the specific policies or legislation they discussed at meetings with government ministers and special advisers.

InfluenceMap has also called on the government to take up this recommendation and address the fundamental flaws in the lobbying act by including in-house lobbyists and publishing all responses to government policy consultants as standard.

Susan Hawley, executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, said the report “starkly demonstrates how major transparency gaps in the UK’s lobbying regime are undermining the development of good climate policy.”

“We fully support their recommendations to make lobbying much more transparent and bring the UK in line with international best practice. These reforms would support more participatory and open decision-making to help rebuild public trust and ensure better decision-making, widening the evidence base for policy making and reducing risks of policy capture by vested interests,” she said.

Oil and gas licensing

In 2022, the UK government quietly dropped two criteria from its ‘Climate Compatibility Checkpoint’ after lobbying from the fossil fuel industry. The checkpoint is used to assess whether proposed oil and gas licenses align with the UK’s climate change goals.

Oil giants BP and Shell and their industry association, Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), responded to a consultation on the checkpoint by objecting to the inclusion of two key metrics for measuring the impact of fossil fuels, according to InfluenceMap’s analysis of consultation responses obtained via Freedom of Information requests.

The measures they opposed would have required the government to consider ‘Scope 3 emissions’ and the ‘global production gap’ when issuing new oil and gas licences.

Scope 3 emissions are produced during end-use and contribute the largest share of all emissions from oil and gas production, while the production gap tracks the discrepancy between planned fossil fuel production and what’s needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C.

The government dropped both criteria from the final checkpoint, which instead focuses solely on operational emissions, which represent only a fraction of total emissions from oil and gas projects.

This outcome, InfluenceMap’s report notes, strongly aligns with the positions advocated for by BP, Shell, and OEUK, suggesting their lobbying efforts were successful.

The following year, the government approved 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences, which had a potential emissions footprint equivalent to Denmark’s annual output.

InfluenceMap’s report also highlights the issues around government consultations on proposed policies, pointing out that, as in this case, lobbyists typically use these to suggest amendments in favour of their clients, but their responses are not published as standard.

Similarly, unlike in the other four Parliaments InfluenceMap looked at, corporations in the UK are not required to declare their engagement on policies, how much they spend on lobbying, or which legislation or decisions they are targeting.

It highlights that this can lead to a situation in which companies make voluntary corporate disclosures that fail to capture the true extent of this advocacy. In this case, InfluenceMap found BP published a summary of its response to the checkpoint that omitted key lines of its opposition, which were only revealed later through Freedom of Information requests.

Rachel Davies, advocacy director at Transparency International UK, said: “This report highlights, yet again, the glaring gaps in our lobbying transparency regime and the potential risks of favouring a small group of vested interests at the public’s expense.

“The UK needs to catch up to other comparable democracies and act swiftly to introduce a comprehensive lobbying register with meaningful disclosures.”

Domestic hydrogen

It is broadly agreed that, in the UK, hydrogen is not a viable solution for decarbonising domestic heating and is an especially bad alternative to heat pumps. Much of our hydrogen comes from burning gas or coal and it cannot be transported through our existing pipelines without massive and costly infrastructure changes.

This reality has been set out by different independent bodies advising the UK government.

In 2021, the Climate Change Committee warned that hydrogen had “not yet been proven at scale and should not be a cause to delay other options” such as the roll-out of heat pumps or low-carbon heat networks. Two years later, the National Infrastructure Commission said the government “should not support the roll-out of hydrogen heating” because there is “no public policy case” for its use.

As InfluenceMap’s report notes, this has not prevented the gas industry from waging a successful lobbying campaign in a bid to shore up its market position – with a clear impact on government policy.

The think tank found the industry pursued its cause in a number of ways, including setting up Hello Hydrogen, a campaign fronted by TV star Rachel Riley, to make the case for using hydrogen in homes to the public in 2022. While the campaign did not declare its funders, its director was also a director of Cadent Gas, the UK’s largest gas distribution network.

Cadent is one of the funders of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Hydrogen, which has publicly called for hydrogen to play a part in domestic heating. The APPG’s other funders include Equinor, Shell and the Energy and Utilities Alliance, a lobbying body run by Mike Foster, the former Labour MP for Worcester (home to Worcester Bosch, a major manufacturer of gas boilers).

Other fossil fuel firms and industry lobbying bodies have also consistently pushed for the use of hydrogen in domestic heating in letters to parliamentary select committees and responses to government consultations.

Ahead of last year’s general election, Centrica (formerly British Gas) wrote to the Public Accounts Committee, which examines the value for money of government projects, to call for further public investment in hydrogen for home heating. The firm had written to the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee in support of the technology less than 12 months earlier.

This industry lobbying has led to indecision and disruption on government plans. A February 2023 report by the House of Lords Committee blamed mixed messages on the effectiveness of hydrogen from the government and industry for the poor uptake of a publicly subsidised scheme for heat pumps, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create many jobs.

The lords’ report concluded: “Hydrogen is not a serious option for home heating for the short to medium-term and misleading messages, including from the government, are negatively affecting take-up of established low-carbon home heating technologies like heat pumps.”

The UK’s heat pump roll-outs have lagged behind those of its neighbours. Just 55,000 heat pumps were installed in the UK in 2019, compared to 600,000 in France, according to a study cited in the InfluenceMap report.

In the UK, this reportedly created around 2,000 jobs and reduced emissions of CO₂ by 0.08 million tonnes (MT); in France 30,000 jobs were created and 0.84 MT of CO₂ emissions avoided.

‘Sustainable’ aviation fuel

InfluenceMap also uncovered how industry significantly influenced the government’s so-called ‘Jet Zero’ strategy for cutting emissions in the UK’s aviation industry, which is heavily reliant on fossil fuels.

Biofuels, largely made up of used cooking oils, are often suggested as an option for producing Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), although they are generally accepted to be worse in terms of scalability than other, more advanced fuels, and much worse than just reducing the number of flights.

The government initially proposed limiting the use of used cooking oil for SAF to alleviate competition on the resource – which is increasingly in demand for other uses, such as producing biodiesel for cars – and to encourage investment in new technologies for the aviation industry.

The proposals included two options; either banning the use of used cooking oil for SAF altogether, or rapidly phasing down its use so that it would make up just 8.5% of total sustainable aviation fuel by 2040.

But the government’s final SAF policy was more closely aligned with industry preferences than scientific warnings, InfluenceMap found. It allows used cooking oil to make up 100% of SAF uptake in 2025 and 2026, 71% in 2030, and 35% in 2040.

InfluenceMap’s analysis reveals the weakened SAF mandate came after pressure from Shell, BP, the International Airlines Group (which owns several airlines), Airlines UK (the trade body for UK-registered airlines) and Virgin Atlantic airline.

It also found that business interests were overrepresented in parliamentary meetings on SAF while the policy was being shaped.

This can be seen in the make-up of Parliament’s Jet Zero Council, “a partnership between industry academia and government”, which was run by Heathrow’s chief operating officer, while the International Airlines Group chaired the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Delivery Group.

The council comprised 24 members from industry, three from academia and one from civil society. Ministers were also directly involved with the council, with then-prime minister Boris Johnson attending the group’s first meeting along with four ministers.

Transparency failures again played a key role. Not a single ministerial meeting on SAF referenced the weakening of the cooking oil cap in official records, and industry responses to consultations were only obtained through Freedom of Information.

Original article by Ethan Shone republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.