Project Summary

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) is preparing its advice to the UK Government and Devolved Administrations on the UK’s Seventh Carbon Budget. To achieve the Seventh Carbon Budget, households will be required to make a range of choices in the way they travel, eat and heat their homes to shift from high carbon to low carbon goods and services (for example, installing a heat pump, and shifting some car journeys to active or public transport). There are a range of different policy approaches the UK Government could pursue to achieve this shift to low carbon goods and services. Different policy approaches will have different costs, impacts and benefits for different households. 

The CCC has commissioned a public dialogue to explore citizen views on the acceptability of illustrative policy packages to achieve the Seventh Carbon Budget pathways and the associated distribution of costs and cost savings across different households. The dialogue will convene a diverse and inclusive group of citizens to explore views on what is needed to make Net Zero policies accessible, attractive and affordable for households in different circumstances. In particular, the dialogue will explore views on the trade-offs implied within and across different illustrative policy packages, the extent to which these are acceptable, and what might be needed (if anything) to enable them to become acceptable. 

To date, a range of dialogues have explored citizen views on the actions (including actions by households) needed to address climate change and meet Net Zero, including the Climate Assembly UK and the Government Office for Science Net Zero Society Dialogue. Past dialogues have highlighted the importance of understanding impacts on different households, but without the space to explore this in depth. This dialogue aims to address this gap, and explicitly focus on how the household actions needed to reach Net Zero can be delivered by policy approaches that citizens view as acceptable.

A novel element of the dialogue design will be the iterative use of the CCC’s model outputs for dialogue discussions. The dialogue will integrate quantitative analysis of  the impacts of different policy approaches on different households into the dialogue discussions. The findings of the dialogue will then inform the CCC’s distributional impact analysis and wider policy advice for its Seventh Carbon Budget advice.