| Government to review how often it publishes data on UK emissions - and represent this alongside GDP. |
124. Measuring a country's climate emissions is a very complicated undertaking. The UK's approach combines a variety of datasets around energy use to create a single calculation. The difficulty of this undertaking means that the final estimates are not published until nearly a year after the end of the year in question.126 The Review accepts that this length of time is required to publish the fully robust statistics required for national accounting purposes. However, there are major drawbacks to this, particularly in the context of the clear public and parliamentary desire for information on the UK's net zero progress, because that delay reduces the usefulness or public interest in the data when it becomes available.
125. The obvious comparison is with GDP. The ONS publishes monthly and quarterly estimates of GDP numbers127 which generally attract media attention and feed into an overall national conversation on the state of the UK economy.128 The comparison is not a perfect one - GDP is a simpler calculation than emissions - but it points towards where emissions data should aim to be.
126. We therefore propose that the Government and the ONS work together to review options for creating a simplified calculation of UK emissions - published with appropriate caveats - to give a more regular indicative sense of UK progress. There may also be a future role for technology to directly measure emissions to allow for more immediate measurement.
127. The end point of this should be for emission and GDP numbers to be published alongside each other. The evidence seen by the Review clearly shows that growth based on high emissions is not sustainable - industry is working to reduce emissions and long-term growth is reduced in a high emission world. As well as helping to provide a high-profile moment for giving the public an update on decarbonisation, publishing an assessment of GDP against UK emissions will help to ensure that any link between future UK growth and emissions is clearly scrutinised - to ensure a long-term sustainable footing for growth.