However, the marriage will not be “cost free”, the director of the UK Energy Research Centre, Jim Watson, has warned.
“Some people see opportunities to integrate energy and climate policy more firmly with wider industrial strategy, while others are concerned over an apparent downgrading of climate change as a policy priority,” he said, at an event in London.
He said “time will tell” which view is correct but the merger “does not mean that the clock is being turned back to the days when government viewed energy as a priority, or when energy and climate issues were split across different departments”.
Watson said the government’s ambition to marry energy and industrial policy, as many other countries in world already do, is a “very, very good thing”. Nevertheless, it will not be “cost free and energy free” because of the “short term process of restructuring within Whitehall”. The move could also “open the door to lobbying”.
He said he was not worried about the government backsliding on climate change policy, because of the commitments which have already been made, and because the new ministerial team at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) have “long-term knowledge and experience of why this transition is important”.
Energy and Climate Change Committee member James Heappey agreed: “I’m very comfortable with the loss of climate change from being explicitly named on a Whitehall department.”
However, he did have fears over the treatment of energy policy in the new department: “My concern is that if you bury energy within a much broader portfolio that the easy option wins through at every stage.” He worried that important opportunities to use exciting new technologies could be missed as the government focuses on making sure the “the lights stay on and the bills stay down”.
In the future energy policy could also face less scrutiny than it currently does. According to Heappey it is unlikely there will be a dedicated energy and climate change committee marking BEIS because civil servants and the government will be opposed to dealing with the extra hassle it would entail. He did not have the same fear for climate change policy because of the existence of the Environmental Audit Committee.