The Climate Change Committee (CCC) annual assessment paints a picture of contradictions, with a need to electrify faster, but a warning that green levies are causing a slowdown due to high electricity prices.

The assessment notes that overall emissions fell another 1.8 per cent in 2025. And there has been ‘good’ progress in a range of areas, with the UK is on track to meet the fourth and fifth carbon budgets.

However, it is in electrification that progress has slowed, including heat pump installations in existing homes (up 7 per cent this year compared to 56 per cent the year before). The share of electricity in industrial energy use also fell slightly last year.

Nigel Topping, chair of the CCC, said: “The transition to clean electricity is not happening fast enough. Government support to accelerate the shift to electric vehicles and heat pumps is critical, not only to keep our climate targets within reach but to unlock savings. At this moment of political uncertainty, any weakening of current positions risks slowing these transitions, undermining investment and the long-term consistency businesses need.”

The CCC recommendations in the report include making electricity cheaper through measures such as removing remaining policy costs from electricity bills, enabling a more rapid transition to EVs by expanding affordable charging infrastructure, accelerating the installation of heat pumps in buildings by cutting costs, removing barriers, and supporting low-income households, and delivering on industrial electrification by speeding up grid connections to remove barriers for businesses electrifying operations.

Green levies are estimated to be adding around £11bn a year to bills (OBR) and this will rise, and thereby lies the dilemma, for the levies can be used to fund grid development, but if they slow electrification it is rather robbing Peter to pay Paul, especially given the competitive disadvantage it put industry and business at.

Already the Government has shifted the majority of the Renewables Obligation from bills to taxation, but even here we are back to shifting cost around and that will always leave something or someone worse off. Politics is the art of deciding who.

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