Professor Thijs Van Rens, an economist at the University of Warwick commented: “The sleight of hand by Rishi Sunak here is truly scandalous. To announce that the government is stopping ‘heavy handed measures’ that were never government policy in the first place, such as meat taxes, sorting rubbish into seven bins or compulsory car shares, takes the public for fools. Some of these suggestions, such as compulsory car sharing, aren’t in place anywhere, let alone here in the UK.

To add insult to injury, some of the measures that are being ruled out would actually be worth considering very seriously. The UK housing stock is the least well insulated in Europe, and there are huge gains to be made from better insulation, both towards Net Zero and to help families reduce their cost of living. Meat production and air travel are both huge contributors to climate change, and the evidence is quite clear that taxing these would be very effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And it does not seem fair that while families pay tax on the fuel they use for their cars, airlines do not pay that tax on fuel for their airplanes.

“The measures that have been announced can be welcomed to some extent, such as lifting the ban on onshore wind and investing in nuclear energy. However, they will not be sufficient to reach net zero by 2050, as the UK has committed to do. And it is a real shame that Sunak has chosen to dress this announcement up in a ‘culture war’ guise by claiming to be stopping measures that were never suggested in the first place”.