Speeches by Miliband.

“We will think of another birthday present for you. I think that what you say about this Committee playing an incredibly important role in this process of scrutiny is right and I genuinely welcome it.”

“Probably not in time for your birthday.”

“The Climate Change Act envisages publication after the delivery of the carbon budget delivery plan, after the setting of the budget. We can get hung up on the terms here. I think that Parliament needs enough information from what we say to make an informed judgment about whether what we recommend, following the CCC’s r…”

“My instincts are that we will need a bit longer than that. We have our carbon budget delivery plan that will come out later on this year. I think that we will need a proper process of cross-government scrutiny of these recommendations.”

“Parliament will have a proper chance of scrutiny sufficiently in advance of the June 2026 deadline. I will not put a date on it today but it is fair to say that the Government need to have a thorough examination of the proposals that come out from the Climate Change Committee. I envisage that taking some time because t…”

“The Climate Change Committee will be coming out with its recommendations very shortly. The Government will then undertake a quite complex cross-government process in advance of the deadline of June 2026 to set out their response. However, in the meantime I would welcome your role in scrutinising the recommendations of …”

“We endorse the commitment to proper information for Parliament to debate these issues. We want it to happen and will make sure it happens.”

“I absolutely think that this Committee has a central role when it comes to carbon budget 7. As you know, Chair, the recommendations from the Climate Change Committee will be coming out next month. I want to put on record that I am determined and completely aligned on the idea that we need a process, that this Committee…”

“A lot of this sits in DEFRA. This is not directly part of the carbon budget process, but I talk to my colleague Steve Reed about it and we are determined to work on it together.”

“Yes, and it is something that we are working on across Government. As you know, it sits in DEFRA but we work closely with it on that. We are very much looking at this and it will be a big focus of what we look at in the spending review.”

“This is about domestic adaptation?”

“It is a very important question and goes to what I said to Barry earlier. Part of the challenge here is that adaptation finance has tended to be underfunded compared to mitigation finance. That has been a big source of understandable anger. There were important commitments made as part of COP29 about making sure that w…”

“From the UK? That is a matter for the spending review. Remember, the way that it works is that we have a development, an ODA budget, and the climate contribution comes out of that ODA budget. The work is obviously with the Treasury but the work is also with the Foreign Office. It is worth saying that Anneliese Dodds an…”

“It is a number that is derived from the Stern-Songwe report. That was the number that they set out, the independent and high-level expert group. All of the evidence is that the climate crisis is accelerating and that the needs of vulnerable countries are greater, but this is a very, very substantial sum of money and we…”

“It is interesting because I have some history in this, as in a number of things. I was part of the setting of the $100 billion goal, along with Gordon Brown, in 2009. The $100 billion was met late but it has been met, with some of the problems that Barry talked about. It is stretching, the $1.3 trillion. It is broadly …”

“Let me take that away.”

“This is a very detailed set of questions but it sounds like exactly the creative solutions that we need in this area. Taking seriously how we do this scaling-up is crucial because we have to bridge quite a big gap here. One of the things that this process has yielded is a big stepping up by the multilateral development…”

“Sorry to interject. Is this through public finance mobilising private and philanthropic finance?”

“There is a lot of detail in the agreement, which was there after discussions with many developing and vulnerable countries, about these issues of quality of finance. They are something that we are taking seriously. Rachel Kyte has incredible experience from the World Bank and is playing an important role on that, but i…”

“The scale of the UK contribution in the years ahead, as you know, Barry, will be determined as part of the spending review. The global goal was set as part of COP29 but the detail of individual countries’ contributions comes after. You raise an important issue, which was very striking to me in the negotiations, that th…”