RAVI: Hello, and welcome, my name is Ravi Gurumurthy and I'm the Chief Executive of Nesta. Nesta is the UK's innovation agency and one of the three big things we're trying to tackle is net zero, our mission on a sustainable future, and key to that is going to be public support and public backing for the big changes that need to happen over the next decade. Now it's quite easy to feel almost complacent about public support, particularly a week before COP, and with both political parties sounding very strong and ambitious about their commitment to net zero but it's quite easy to forget how Brittle that consensus and support can be, so a decade ago I was working in the Coalition government and just a year or so after the Cameron government had declared itself to be the greenest government ever, the Prime Minister was saying, let's get rid of the green crap and the Treasury was trying to roll back on commitments. So commitments can be very fragile. More recently we've seen with international development again a legislative commitment to 0.7% of GDP going towards aid quite easily pushed aside in the face of the sort of COVID crisis. So what we need to worry about, I think, in the next decade is a replay of that. Now, we've got a lot more momentum, there's much more support and investment than ever before, but there are also bigger asks of consumers and the public - energy prices are on the rise again, and the kind of changes we need to see in the next decade and beyond involve more invasive changes to people's lives - the cars they drive, the homes and boilers that they have, and beyond that, whether people need to adjust their habits in terms of flying and food. So we're going to be discussing that with four great panellists. We have with us today Chris Stark, who is the Chief Executive of the Committee on Climate Change. Lucy Yu who is director of the Octopus Centre for Net Zero. Sarah Allan, director of capacity building and standards at Involve. And Tim Lord who is the senior fellow for net zero policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Growth. Now, I would like to ask them to say a quick introduction. What I'll do after that is get each of them to say about five minutes and then we'll throw it open for discussion and questions. So do, please, pop your questions in the chat, as people are speaking, and I'll bring them in at the end. So, first of all, Chris, welcome. Do you want to just introduce yourself?

CHRIS: Yes, hi, Ravi, and hello to the audience. I'm Chris Stark, I'm the chief exec of the UK's Climate Change Committee and we've been having lots of fun recently looking at the government's new net zero strategy and we'll get to talk about that, I'm sure, in just a second.

RAVI: Thank you, Lucy?

LUCY: Hi, everyone, I'm Lucy Yu, I run Octopus Centre for Net Zero, we are a research centre using real-world data to model faster, fairer and more affordable paths to net zero with a particular focus on the energy transition.

RAVI: Thank you very much and welcome. Sarah?

SARAH: Hello, everyone, I'm Sarah Allan, I'm director of capacity building and standards at Involve. Involve is the UK's public participation charity and we develop, support and campaign for new ways for people to shape the decisions that affect their lives. We don't just work on climate, but our work on climate includes Climate Assembly UK for the UK parliament, Scotland's Climate Assembly for the Scottish government and numerous local citizens' assemblies and juries. We're also doing work on community-led just transition to Net Zero and we're about to launch a new big programme working with local authorities and their partners on how to engage the public locally.

RAVI: Welcome. Finally, Tim?

TIM: Hi, everyone, I'm Tim Lord, senior fellow on Net Zero at the Tony Blair Institute so focusing in particular on what net zero means for the UK and in particular for the politics of the UK. Before that I spent nearly 20 years working for central government in a variety of departments, reflecting the fact that climate policy has moved around in government over that time, so working on energy efficiency policy, energy infrastructure policy and then most recently running the UK decarbonisation strategy until the end of last year.

RAVI: Great, Tim, I think you are going to kick off first of all, because we're going to talk about the big long-term changes required from net zero but we have to get through quite an immediate, difficult energy crisis which is leading to price rises and quite significant changes in the energy market with energy retailers going bust. I'd be interested in you reflecting on whether this crisis threatens the long-term support for net zero, particularly given significant price rises, and also how this crisis can also be used as an opportunity - can it be used to actually cement support for the changes required for net zero?

TIM: Yes, sure. So I think the first thing to say is, you know, crisis as a word is bandied around a lot but I think this is a crisis in the energy retail market at the moment and I think we're actually still in the early stages of it, because we're still seeing companies going bust, so I would expect to see quite a few more companies going bust. Even more importantly, consumers are facing price rises - I came off a protected tariff a few weeks ago and my electric has gone up - and I think we are going to see more of this, in terms of the politics of this, I don't think we've seen anything yet. I think the key thing in terms of the longer-term lessons is thinking about what the causes of this are and therefore what we should learn because for me there are four things we need to take from it. There is first of all the fact that this is a crisis driven by fossil fuel markets and fossil fuel prices. There is not that much you can do about that and the only way I think we really can do with it is reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and reduce our dependence on those markets. The people who argue we deal with the crisis in fossil fuels by doubling down on them - that is not a sensible long-term strategy. The second thing is we use too much energy and we waste too much energy. We're hugely underinvested in energy efficiency. I think the government plans in the last week or so probably don't go far enough on that and it's interesting, you mentioned the kind of "Get rid of the green crap" days back in 2013 and one the direct consequences of that was that we reduced energy efficiency investment and the CCC have done a great chart on this that shows it going off a cliff in 2013. That means we're using more energy and importing more gas as a result so we really need to learn that lesson. The third is that the energy retail market doesn't work very well, so the incentive is for consumers to switch all the time and energy retail companies to work on a very short-term basis, to take a lot of risk. There are a few exceptions to that and Octopus is one of them, but in general this is an investment-heavy transition to net zero and we're not creating the right incentives for government to maximise the opportunities there. But the fourth one is that energy is a big deal politically. We've kind of forgot that a bit in the last ten years but actually not just in terms of national politics but geopolitically when you look at some of the stuff around Russia, you look at what's happening with China, because of its dependence on imports, and that's clearly going to be important. In terms of what we need to do, I mean, short-term we need to manage the exit of suppliers from the market. We need to try and spread of costs of that over a long period so consumers aren't so affected but the key thing for me is making the case for why this actually shows that the net zero transition is the right transition, not just for the climate, but for consumers, but also designing a retail market that isn't just based around a kind of race to the bottom in terms of price but is based around companies being able to build relationships with consumers to enable demand to be flexible, to manage some of those peaks. I think if politicians make the case for that and don't fall into the trap of doubling down on fossil fuels, it can be an opportunity to transition to a better system in the future.

RAVI: Great, thank you, Tim. Really helpful overview of the challenge and opportunity of the next 12 months. Chris Stark, your job is to look much more long-term and plot the transition out to 2050. I think it would be great if you could set out, what are the kind of key consumer-related changes that need to happen in the next decade and beyond? And how do we do that in a way that's fair, where we spread the costs well, and bring consumers along with us?

CHRIS: Well, I mean, that's such an interesting question to ask, because actually I mean, to a very large degree everything is a consumer-related change. We still talk about this challenge, you know, as being an energy supply question often and I think you are going to see that in the COP in the next week or so that we're still talking about the energy challenge but actually so much of what needs to happen is about the things that we do, the technologies that we use, the things that we buy. That bit of the challenge is now coming into view, I think, particularly here in the UK. You can see the kind of next set of debates are not so much about how we generate electricity, for example. They're much more about the things that we do in our day-to-day lives. So it's worth just standing back from all the things that the government put out in the last week - 2,000 pages of stuff, so it's quite an astonishing amount of new material to plough through, and we have been trying to do that in my team and I think what they're effectively saying - I think it's quite a seductive story, actually. They're saying to consumers, the people, "We' take care of decarbonising electricity and industry, you just get yourself ready to switch the things that you use in your everyday life and be confident when it comes to, you know, the mid 2030s that electricity is going to be green". And that is, I think, quite a good way of communicating what needs to happen. It fits quite well with what we've said. We talked about the next two decades ahead being kind of critical. You can frame them up as being the 2020s being about scaling up and getting ready I suppose and moving to the point you've got supply chains for all the things you will need and you are in the position to do it and the 2030s is the big challenge of rolling everything out and that is when you get the sharp emissions reduction as a result of everyone moving to these carbon neutral technologies. So that's what the government is saying as well, that by 2030 this mass switchover is what needs to happen for the consumer. That's when the government has said they will phase out sale of petrol and diesel cars and fossil fuel boilers. I think, broadly, people are ready for that move to electric vehicles. They might be at some point ready to the move to heat pumps, maybe that will follow a similar thing, the jury is out on that, but interestingly we in our work see a role for what you might call more direct behaviour changes, so lifestyle changes, changing diets, because that frees up agricultural land, so you can plant more trees. Bearing down on the growth that we see in the demand for flying in the future. There's nothing at all from the government on those things and perhaps that's not surprising but they've really stepped back from anything that looks like it might interfere, I suppose, with those patterns of behaviour. That's going to make the challenge of moving to technologies higher risk, the technology challenge is where the government sees these things overall. So when you look more widely at some of the other things we need to do like home efficiency, retrofits in the home and home insulation, nothing much on that either and I suppose the challenge is now we've got a government that isn't keen on those changes. And we would say in combination those changes to demand make the challenge easy yes but we don't have a government that's shown itself particularly willing to do that so we are going to have to look even harder at those technology changes which again comes to the consumer and I think overall thing that the government is saying is don't worry about that if you are a consumer, we are going to ask business to take care of this, we're going to put mandates on various businesses to do various things, they are going to be responsible for bringing the costs down for the consumer and the consumer will make the switch and it won't be painful but actually that's quite a high-risk strategy overall and it prompts the final point of the question you were asking which is about how you do all of this fairly. If you are rich you can buy a Tesla today but of course the challenge is going to be that there are large parts of society who are not in a position to buy those high-cost, sometimes, technologies and we have to rely on the market to bring down the costs for those people, or their switch is going to be painful and expensive for them and I think that's kind of the biggest gap I can see in the government's strategy is we haven't got much on what you might think of as the distributional impacts of this from the government, from the Treasury. We don't have much on how we will protect vulnerable consumers. So there's still a lot to do on this but it is quite interesting to see how the government is bringing it together.

RAVI: Thank you very much, Chris. One of the things I know that you're interested in is the role of climate assemblies and deliberative democracy in how we embed better public support and we have Sarah Allan who is going to talk more about that now. And in particular draw out what are the lessons for how to do climate assemblies and deliberative democracy well at scale and how can they actually be effective. So, Sarah?

SARAH: Thank you very much. So I'm going to break that down into how you do them well, how you do them at scale and then why they're effective. So in terms of how we do these things well, these are really tried and tested methods now. They're being used increasingly around the globe, they're being used increasingly also in the UK. So I talked about in my introduction Climate Assembly UK, Scotland's Climate Assembly and all the local processes that are happening around the country at the moment and if you really think about any area of a deliberative process, be that how you recruit the participants, be that the transparency, the facilitation techniques, areas around inclusion and how you plan for impact, we know how to do it in a really high-quality way and if you commission one of these now you should expect a really high-quality piece of engagement. That doesn't obviously mean that practice around them is at a standstill, so as with any field new areas get explored all the time but we know that these methods are reliable. We know they're effective and we know how to do them. So if you like, how to do them well is kind of a less interesting question to me. The question that's kind of more interesting in what you posed is this question of scale and how do you do that, how do you scale them? So I think there's probably three aspects of that, or three ways you could scale them. So the first is you could scale by having more of them and that's where the kind of idea of local areas running these housing associations, for example, running these really comes into play and gives you that much broader reach. So there has been a really good example recently of a social housing tenants climate jury run by the Northern Housing Consortium which did a process just with residents of social housing and looking at how to retrofit homes, which I know they found very useful. That's one example in Bristol, already, we've seen their citizens' assembly include a question quite specifically on how we reduce the impact of homes on climate change. So that's one way to scale - more processes at a more local level. Another way to scale is for processes that are running to have more impact. So that's about profile in part, as you saw it in France with somebody over there, obviously backed by President Macron. But another way to do that is to have processes around citizen's assemblies, so calls for evidence around them, chances for people to input ideas. So in Camden, for example, there was a big process before their citizens' assembly on climate where they went out to schools to gather ideas to put on the assembly. So that is a way to put more people in touch with and involved with the process. Then I think the third way to scale which is the one I'm personally less sure about is to increase the number of people involved in these processes themselves. So Jim Fishkin’s team at Stanford University has created this potential monster, I think, which is an automated facilitator. So the idea is that you have thousands of people who can take part in the process and a computer moderates their discussion and it tells you if someone is dominating the discussion, you know, it checks for swearwords and related terms, and the idea of that is you could have many more people involved at the same time. So I think that has got some legs actually but probably has some quite profound impacts on inclusion which would be the ones to watch. There's also work from people like Public Agenda in the States and they have a method called text/talk/engage, where people are in groups and they text on their phones and they get questions and information and videos to watch through and they deliberate themselves and then send their answers back. Which is another way to give people kind of an experience of taking part in these processes in a way that's potentially quite a lot more scaleable. So that's kind of what we know about how they work well and how they're scaleable. In terms of why they're effective, well I think the thing here is that they're effective for everyone - they're effective for the people who commission them, they're effective for the people who take part and actually in many ways they're effective for people who don't take part, too. I'm not going to be exhaustive about this, but some of the benefits for commissioners, for example, is the ability to road test the acceptability of policies and arguments for them. So I think it was Tim, actually, who reminded me the other day that the poll tax scored really well in opinion polling because people were just asked, you know, "Should everyone pay the same" and that sounded like a great idea. But you know, obviously that didn't go so well when it was launched. So if you have these processes that allow people to properly understand policies and the ins and outs of them, that shouldn't happen, you should really understand what public concerns are before they're launched and that, in turn, can give decision-makers the confidence to act, the confidence about how to argue for policies, and so on. You also get much better-informed policies because of reasons around collective intelligence and bringing a diversity of people into the room and one of the easiest ways to conceptualise that, although it isn't the only way that's relevant, is the impact of these policies around questions of fairness. So you can be sitting in Whitehall and think that something sounds like a great idea but your own personal experience to those on the ground, particularly to those who might be particularly disadvantaged by some of the changes to net zero and you won't understand fully the impact those policies could have on people or the ideas that those people could contribute to a process of what a good policy to achieve these aims for them would look like. So you get better-informed policy, and fairer policy, crucially, too. And then it also allows people to work through their differences and find common ground. So instead of decision-makers being lobbied with all sorts of different groups and different positions, it creates a space where people can come together and find out what they have in common. For people who take part, it provides them with information that they wouldn't normally have. We know one of the reasons that citizens assemblies always come out with usually recommendations for more information for the better of the public is about how much people value having that much greater information about what's happening, they create a respectful atmosphere welcome back people can discuss these issues in a safe space and they lead to quite profound changes for people in terms of their own behaviour and views. So 83% of the assembly members who took part in Climate Assembly UK have gone on to change their behaviour as a result of their participation. And for people who don't take part, it increases their perception of trust in the system that policies were arrived at fairly and it gives them sets of relatable role model and focus people to talk about, rather than the people versus climate change documentary on the BBC at the moment, and you will see that which covers Climate Assembly UK and you will see a really good example of assorted everyday spokespeople that these processes can result in.

RAVI: Great, thank you, Sarah. Lucy, I mean, another way of thinking about this is to not focus on public attitudes and people deliberating about the major changes but to make the product aspirational, cheap and effective and that is what you are trying to do, particularly around heat pumps. Do you want to say a little bit more about the work that you are doing and also what we can do to make the transition consumer-friendly?

LUCY: Yes, thanks, Ravi. So I think, first of all, we sort of need to understand what we actually mean by 'consumer-friendly' and we know that consumers, or just people as I prefer to call them, we know that they value cost and convenience and reliability and so these are certainly areas that we can focus on. I think when it comes to cost, actually, the provision of grants and means of helping those early adopters in these technologies are extremely valuable there. We know that in technology as a general field there is a concept of learning effects and this refers to the idea, the concept, that technologies become cheaper as they scale. So one of the things you can do to bring the cost down for the majority is to help that particular technology get to scale as quickly as possible. So I think grants will play a very important role there. In terms of convenience, though, when I worked at the Cabinet Office in the mid-2000s I had a colleague, Nigel, and his entire home was a smart home and everything was automated - the light bulbs, the heating, the locks on the door and everything, and this was possible because he was one of those kinds of people who, you know, probably spent all his spare time fiddling with Raspberry Pis and all that stuff so he had a huge amount of geeky knowledge and know-how I mention this because in a way this is almost the sort of position we're in with heat at the moment, which is not to say if you want to install an electric heat pump for your property, you need to be able to do it yourself, but it is actually not as straightforward as an out of the box installation and that is really where we need to get to with this. This is an area where Octopus Energy is placing a huge amount of focus on, not just trying to bring the cost of the actual units themselves down but also to make the installation as simple as possible, because this makes it faster, and this makes it cheaper to do. So actually getting to that point where we have something which is very convenient, doesn't inconvenience homeowners and can be done quickly and easily. I think those things are true for the kind of the majority, the - most people in adopting technologies but I think there's also an extra thing which is true for the early adopters and that's cache. So I think just as you say, Ravi, we need to find a way to really make these things aspirational and I think that has happened now for electric vehicles. If you think about the people you know who were the first to purchase an electric vehicle, there may be a handful of people, maybe, who bought a Nissan Leaf, but I would expect in those cases those people may have purchased their Leaf because they were genuinely very motivated by environmental factors. But I'm willing to bet that the people who bought the Tesla Model Xs may well have been motivated by environmental factors but that was not the only factor at play there. So we really need to get to the point where we have a similar situation for these low-carbon technologies. I would love to see Teslas, Dysons, the Apples of this world coming into this space and designing these things and making them really aspirational, you know, why can Dyson sell a hairdryer for £300 when you can buy one from Argos for £10 and it does the job exactly the same? It's all about the aspirational qualities of it. I might mention as well, I have a Smeg fridge. I didn't buy it, but I inherited it when I bought the property, but the reason I mention is these are aspirational fridge/freezers and fridges are really heat pumps in reverse. So I think we need to make sure that we make this something that people want to buy into not just for the green credentials but for something more than that. Finally maybe just a quick comment on the customer journey here. You know, how many times have you maybe - you've had a big purchase, perhaps an electrical item, and you've bought it from a particular retailer, maybe a John Lewis or something like that, because you have felt more confident about the aftercare that you would get for that purchase? Again I think just really thinking about the customer journey and investing in purchasing these low-carbon technologies and make sure that people feel that there is a means of not just having a smooth installation, but also getting the kind of follow-on support they need once that has happened, and knowing there's somewhere they can go, perhaps for help or advice, if they need it. So those are all things that I think can really help the customer transition, which are not necessarily so much about the points that the other panellists have been talking about, but things that I think will help to actually just shift from the kind of early adopters into the mainstream.

RAVI: Thank you very much, Lucy. And thanks to all the panellists there. Perhaps we can just start off, Lucy, by talking about heat pumps - I just want to pick up on some of your points. I think the first question I have is, when you look at the technical potential around heat pumps to become a better product fundamentally and a cheaper product, what do you see as being possible? Because you could argue that this is actually quite a mature technology, it has been deployed at scale in many countries and therefore it's like the electric car, that is not quite the right analogy. So do you see the heat pump really becoming significantly better? It might look cooler, it might be more smartly designed, but what's the sort of potential improvement in the actual technology?

LUCY: Yeah, it's a good question, and you're right to point out that this is - this is a technology that in some Nordic countries elsewhere is quite widely adopted. I actually think a lot of the potential will be around really making much more - so I talked about kind of out of the box installations. So if you look at the cost of installing a heat pump today, maybe about half of that will be the capital cost of the units and the other half will be effectively costs of installation. So actually I think there's a lot of scope for innovation around that side of things, really turning this not from a kind of 2-week - a 2-week process involving careful project management and maybe a number of contractors, to actually just something a lot more like having your gas boiler replaced, which could maybe be done over the course of a few hours. So I think there's a lot of scope for improvement there.

RAVI: And just on that, Lucy, given that often it might involve changing your radiators or making your home better insulated, and homes are all quite different, is it really feasible to make it as plug-and-play as a boiler?

LUCY: So I think it is. And Octopus certainly have high ambitions in this space, and actually we have huge ambitions not just to make things plug-and-play but also to bring costs down very rapidly in this area. I think you're right, though, to raise the issue of energy efficiency. I was on another call earlier and I sort of used the analogy, you wouldn't keep trying to fill a leaky bucket without first trying to fix the leak, and I think energy efficiency has a huge role to play here, and actually the two need to work in tandem so it's not just about moving to lower carbon technologies to heat your home but also, wherever possible, to put those measures in place to actually make your home more efficient to begin with.

RAVI: I'd like to bring in Chris and Tim on this question, because to some extent costs and improvements in the technology will come from scale and we're starting to see hopefully a little bit of that with the extra money that governments recently announced. But is there more that needs to be done or can be done to foster innovation in the heat pump market? Tim? And then Chris.

CHRIS: I'll let Tim take it, I think that's a hard question for him!

TIM: I think there is more that can be done to foster innovation. On the one hand, as you say, there's this sort of slight myth building up particularly in the right-wing press that heat pumps are this incredibly novel technology that just doesn't work and when Lucy and you mentioned there's many countries in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, that use them so in that sense they are a mature technology and that is a good thing. For me where the scope for real innovation is, is in the relationship we have with the people who sell us energy who broadly speaking sell us a commodity for the lowest price they can and what that has led to is people taking risks in the buying of their energy and when that commodity spikes they go out of business which doesn't feel like a sustainable model. A much better model is where energy retailers consider it as a service and engage with us in a much more meaningful way and develop long-term relationships and that to me is where the real innovation is, it is not just in the tech, it is in the scaling of the supply chain so more people can fit these things and it get cheaper but crucially it is in the relationship our energy suppliers have with us because if that is where the potential cost reductions can come, that's where consumers can start feeling the benefit of this transition.

RAVI: And that vision of an energy company that provides a service to you - heating and lighting - and is making money as much by lowering your energy use, rather than getting you to use more units of energy, that vision has been around or talked about for a long time. What do we need to do to actually enable that to happen? Does Ofgem's regulatory framework needs to change or do you think businesses like that are emerging or will emerge organically.

TIM: Very briefly those business models are starting to emerge in parts of the market and again Octopus are always a good example of these kinds of things and looking to start building these kinds of relationships but I think we need to look at the incentives we create within this market. The last ten years of energy retail policy have been all about switching and that is the anti-thesis of enabling people to build relationships with customers to the point that you will be switched automatically at the end of your contract. For a company that's looking to make an investment in a long-term change to its business model, that is reliant on having long-term relationships with consumers, at the moment, you know, government policy, regulatory policy goes directly against that. So I think that is absolutely something that we need to look at, otherwise we will continue to have a kind race to the bottom on cost as we come out of the crisis that we're currently experiencing.

RAVI: So, Chris, I've given you the time to think about a good answer now so it has to be really profound!

CHRIS: I think we're doing it in this discussion. You get obsessed with the innovation on the technology side and of course there is a need for that but actually the innovation is probably around more straightforward things like, can you get, you know, a bloke to come round and look at your boiler properly who knows how to install a heat pump? Is there a supply chain in the area that you live to do that? There's no real barrier to using heat pumps, this is an important thing to say and actually another little trope that I see emerging is that somehow we have to attach a higher standard to the efficiency that you need in the home to use a heat pump. You know, we have incredibly inefficient homes with gas boilers. We could do with having a bit of energy efficiency but you can have a bigger heat pump. We will almost certainly still have leaky homes in the future, and they will be heated with heat pumps. They might be oversized but that I'm afraid is what we have at the moment. So there's this kind of - I think there is a danger of letting the best be the enemy of the good here. That said, it's not all about heat pumps and I think it's a really important thing to say that there will be large swathes of the country, particularly those properties and people who live in cities, where actually the best outcome is not to move to a heat pump, it is to have district heating, another thing you find commonly in Scandinavian countries and that requires a bit of planning really to establish what the plan is for that town as they move off the gas network and I suppose it's a little clearer now what the government plans to do. At least they're saying that by 2035 they will not have any new installations of natural gas boilers in this country and that sets the clock running on what needs to happen. But there's a lot more that needs to be done to get to the point where we know, as people living in these homes, what the right technology choice will be and then we can start to plan for that. I think that is an innovation - the idea of building a plan. I have to say I'm very taken with this idea that, you know, we should really have local plans for this particular aspect of the transition, then local supply chains will grow. There's trust that comes with that, potentially. But clearly there's certainty that comes with that, too, and that idea of kind of innovating around the idea of a plan, a city-wide plan, for example, is not the kind of thing that you see written into the net zero strategy but it would really, really help. I mean, I live in a lovely flat in the west end of Glasgow, but it is going to be very difficult to get a heat pump that can heat it and I'm happy to try, but it would be much better if I was connected to the district heating network that's literally two streets away from me that Glasgow University has just put in. So, you know, that kind of idea that you need to know what the right pathway is is the sort of innovation I think we really need and it's quite interesting, to go back to some of the work that Sarah led with Climate Assembly, people when we spoke to them about the kind of technology choices that lay ahead for heating homes, were largely indifferent about what the technology would be - they kind of accepted that whatever it would, that it would heat their home. What they were much more concerned about was what you might call the buggeration factor - how many times is this going to happen to me in my home, is it going to be a local tradesperson that does it, how many times will they come, so I think it's that innovation which you could think of more as social innovation overall.

RAVI: Sarah, I'm interested in any of the deliberative democracy work that you have been involved in you've seen that capitalise a really good local plan where it has galvanised into clearer actions than they would otherwise have done?

SARAH: Yeah, absolutely. So I was actually at an event last week with three local councils who were talking about the local citizens' seam bliss or climate juries, two were on climate and another of which was on hate crime, and we were talking about how it had gone on to galvanise action in their area and they all had different examples of exactly what it had done for them. But for example, in one of the areas, what had been the oversight committee kind of guiding citizens' assembly had become so enthused they now meet every six months with members of the climate jury there, and members of the council, to keep track of how the recommendations are being implemented and discuss how to take the kind of more complex ones further. They've changed the sorts of projects that they fund. They look at them now through a net zero lens and whether they're compatible with the assembly's recommendations. They've done things like solar audits of the town, and they've looked at implementing a 20mph speed limit throughout and they sorted out zero carbon innovation hubs I believe they're called both physically within the town and also online as a one-stop shop for people celebrating what's happening locally, and they've produced municipal composting and a whole range of other things they've done and that is not an uncommon story that we see coming through from councils who have used these sorts of processes.

RAVI: Great, thank you. And Henry has just put a question in the chat, we'll cover questions, and one is about what we can learn from the referendum in Switzerland where voters rejected car fuel levies and a tax on air tickets. I think that's one for you.

CHRIS: Shall I take that one?

RAVI: Go for it.

CHRIS: Loads is your answer! It's very similar to what came out of the Climate Assembly process, they were keen on a frequent flyer levy, for example, and this government isn't. We have to accept that this isn't a government that is keen to do these kinds of things. It doesn't fit with the sort of plan that the government clearly wants to fulfil and see through for net zero. I think we're going to have to go back and think about that in the work that we've done. We've seen quite a big role for changes in consumption, changes in demand, particularly in the short-term, actually, and over the next ten years that was doing quite a lot of the heavy lifting in emissions reduction in the pathways that we laid out for the government. Government is much, much keener on technology change, on putting an obligation particularly on business to deliver that technology at a cost that the consumer will be happy to pay, and I suppose that is therefore what we've got to work with. But I still make the point that I think these sorts of things where you're actively trying to change demand in a way that broadly there is public support for do make the overall transition easier. They make the tasks smaller because you are reducing the size of the problem in the first place by reducing demands for high carbon goods but you're also potentially sending signals here which is I think the other aspect of this about the kind of engagement that goes with this, the public engagement over the changes that lie ahead and again the strategy that we've seen from government talks about that but it doesn't open up a clear strategy for how you engage people across the country about the changes that lie ahead. And I think, maybe making a political point, that has left a space for those who are not so keen on acting in all of this to then start to prod on some of the technologies and present things like heat pumps as exotic new technologies, untested, despite the fact if you go to somewhere like New Zealand you'll find that most homes in New Zealand are heated with a heat pump. We are already at the point where 1 million heat pumps a year are sold in Germany. So they are not exotic technologies but it is an easy product to prod at because the government hasn't taken people on this journey yet and I think that links back to the journey that needs to happen overall.

SARAH: Can I come back too on that briefly? I think one of the things about that is their choice of methods. Obviously, you can have referendums on all sorts of things but it does lead you to a situation where people are asked, you know, do you want this particular policy, kind of in isolation from the other options that you might need to have if you don't do that would be. It also leads to a situation where people are voting very much usually on their gut reaction to the policy issue and that can be quite powerfully swayed by the most powerful best soundbites that they hear in the media. So one thing that you can learn from that is that perhaps referendums are not the best way of engaging the public on these sorts of issues and what is needed is a much more careful process where people have more time to learn about the issues and understand the kind of trade-offs they're making and if not that, well then you are going to have this, is that better or not, and for governments to see what people's reactions to those policies are and to make the argument for them better. Like Chris said, the Climate Assembly backed frequent flyer le have Is after consideration of the other options and among real discussion amongst one another and that is the fairest way forward.

TIM: Can I add to that really quickly because on the Swiss referendum I wrote something about this and looked at the campaign in particular and there's one thing that's worth drawing out that's interesting, which is that the campaign ended up being about elitists trying to enforce climate policy, and the 'no' campaign that was based around an elitist agenda which might remind you of another referendum campaign that was also successful and I think one of the key lessons there is about fairness because when you think about fairness in this space when you talk in jargon which no-one understands like just transition, which I think is important to think about, but most people don't know what it is, including me, but it's thinking about the poorest, and it is important we do this but what does this mean for the middle seven income deciles, the ordinary people as they might describe and see themselves, is really important. So what about the people who don't have a driveway, including me, as it happens, where they can't drive their electric vehicle home and therefore have a huge swathe of cost reductions and benefits from energy use they can't access. What about those people? There is a lot of them and they aren't necessarily the bottom of the income distribution but unless we make this fair and non-elitist not just for the poorest in society but for the people in the middle we will hit these problems again and again and I think that is a really important lesson to take from what happened in Switzerland.

RAVI: I want to come back to this question that, Chris, you raised about the extent to which action is needed on things like aviation and food, and it seems like a grade A question to actually be clear about because if you are in that mode of actually having to change people's tastes and preferences and limit their choices, that seems like a massively more difficult political sell than, say, you know, just getting people to buy a different car or a different boiler. And there's two questions, really - one, to what extent, if you look at pathways that don't try to limit demand on aviation or meat-eating, whether it becomes difficult to get to net zero? And, secondly, when is the right time to actually mount this argument? Because you could well argue that you might want to sequence it, you might want to prepare the ground, and going too hard now might contaminate the more easy to do behaviours, ones that aren't about changing lifestyles, and make it all feel a little deep green and therefore put people off?

CHRIS: Yes, I mean, I'm happy to take that. I mean you can get to net zero without it, it just means it's harder and I would say higher risk. Aviation, I mean, we do have scenarios that can achieve net zero with higher aviation growth. You know it's just an easier thing to do if you've not done it. The diet thing is really interesting because in our work we've done we haven't suggested punitive policies like meat taxes, which is often held up as kind of an Aunt Sally suggestion, the strawman, the Prime Minister does it lot, you know, we're not going to implement a meat tax - well, no-one has suggested we should. So there is an interesting thing about that, he kind of uses that as a way into doing all the other stuff. He presents it as a thing he is not doing so you can look away from the other stuff that he is going to do. That's an interesting political technique that he is developing. But actually I'm sure there is diet change in the pathways that the government has suggested in just the last week. It's just that they're not explicit. So broadly, we are already as a nation eating less meat. You can probably see that most obviously in the various surveys there have been on consumption patterns by age, you know, depending what food you eat and what we've talked about in our work is more about prodding people, if that's the right word, I don't think it is actually, so pushing people to the guidance that is already out there about healthier eating and actually the healthier eating guidance is much, of more extreme than anything we've ever suggested, but actually that kind of thing would help - potentially providing more information to the consumer might help. I'm a bit more dubious about that, but that idea that you could have better labelling, for example. The other angle to this is that the government in terms of the state actually provides a lot of meals. So if you look at school meals, for example, and that says a lot potentially that could be done there. You could have meat-free days, for example, in school canteens, which is what my kids have and that can help, too. So it's not really about sort of telling people, "You can't have something". The aviation one is probably where the biggest battleground is, I would say. If we look at aviation, there are certainly pathways to achieving net zero without constraining demand but it starts to - when you get to the 2040s, aviation looks like the biggest sector for emissions. So you're kind of cutting off one of the really good pathways to achieving it and you raised, Ravi, a really interesting point about when is the right time to talk about these changes in consumption patterns? And I suppose that's down to the politicians, but I mean we would say that it's better to kind of gradually achieve these changes over time. So it's the right thing to do to flag that they help overall. The diet one, just to come back to that for a second, really does matter because if we don't see a change in the nation's diet then it is going to be difficult to free up farmland to do what we need somewhere else, which is to plant trees and to grow energy crops. So there is a link here and particularly - we are particularly a constrained island when it comes to the availability of land. So, you know, the government can't really duck this forever. But I suspect there is more in what the Government has published than has been made explicit.

RAVI: I think the diet becomes really interesting when you look at it on a global scale. So if you look at some global models about what would happen if poorer countries would start having the same diet as the states it becomes pretty impossible to meet net zero targets. So the degree to which China becomes the Mediterranean rather than Texas matters massively but I think even in the UK there will become a more important issue but it may well come through the folks on healthy eating and obesity as much as the focus specifically on climate change. Can I turn to this question about fairness, because, Tim, you picked up on it before. And it's also a question that actually Henry Smith has asked about, you know, many of those who live in the most energy inefficient poorest quality homes are older people, how can we better influence behaviour of this age group? I just want to broaden this question, though, not just about specific groups. Maybe, Lucy, you could pick up that question about, are you segmenting the market enough and understanding about how you can get to the kind of groups that Henry mentioned? But I'm interested in other views on how you make this transition feel fair, because it seems really, really important to avoid this perception of winners and losers that could really derail the agenda. Lucy?

LUCY: Yes, thanks for the question. So I guess just looking at, again, how do we influence the behaviour of different groups and how do we ensure fairness? I think we talked a lot about raising awareness, which is obviously, you know, the first step in the journey, really, of influencing people's behaviour. I think really we need to understand - so the whole of society is going to need to go through this transition. So in many respects it doesn't really matter which particular group we're talking about, whether we're talking about younger people, old people, low-income people, et cetera. I think what's really useful here is to try to understand whether the particular barriers or the particular challenges for each of these different groups, say, in relation to older people, you know, there may well be a perceived, I guess, a perceived reluctance to invest in some of these technologies if they think they are not going to get the full kind of payback later down the line. So I think some of this is around how we structure grants and incentives to enable people to actually be able to purchase, adopt, these technologies, and really being quite smart about how we might - how we might design and direct them at different groups. So, for instance, if we think about which parts of society are typically early adopters of new technologies, younger people are certainly in there, younger people may well have a more kind of green attitude as well, so there may be things that could be done around, for instance, incentives for people to purchase their first homes. So younger people, obviously, because of the housing market at the moment, find that it's very difficult to get onto the ladder. There are existing schemes around to support that. Actually those things could be combined with also incentives to help those people as they get on the ladder also purchase those technologies and do other things to make those properties more energy efficient and more low carbon. So I think really it is about - the answer is almost in your question, Ravi. It is about really drilling down and not just trying to look at the system on average, but actually trying to understand what are the challenges facing different groups and how can we design really kind of intelligent policy, intelligent incentives, for each of those.

RAVI: Thank you. Who else wants to come in on this?

SARAH: I'm happy to say something. So I'd say one thing that we know from all the public engagement we've done is that people want to understand that we're not just asking the public to change in isolation - that business and government are changing, too. So one way that you can help people's perceptions that this is fair is to communicate really well about how you are asking others to change and how others are changing. It will be that governments own buildings and premises, businesses, offices, so the public don't think you're asking them to do it by themselves. The other thing is that if you get the public involved in designing policy you really want to drill down on what 'fairness' means to them and fairness can mean a lot of different things but what are different groups' particularly concerns in terms of fairness and how can you address that in how policy is developed and how policy is implemented to give them that feeling that they're not being unfairly treated? And obviously if you are involving them and understanding what their concerns are, you know, and Chris talked about, you know, it goes back to local plans as well, which Chris didn't mention, but their concerns were around things like disruption and cost and things like that you might expect. But that process makes it feel less unfair on them. And then obviously if you make people's involvement in the process kind of high-profile and you say that you've involved people in designing what should happen, then you get this benefit called procedural fairness, which is really well covered in the academic literature now and soundly proved which is when people perceive people like them have been involved in designing policy they perceive it to have been done more in their interests, rather than someone else's vested interests, and they have greater trust that it is fair and that it is a sensible thing to be doing. You're muted.

RAVI: Sorry, one of the things I reflect on about this question about fairness is how do you spread the costs effectively? And if I think back to what we were doing in the Energy and Climate Change Department ten years ago, we decided to put all the costs of renewable energy onto electricity bills and that was partly because there's no way we could get a £9 billion tax rise out of Treasury and the stealthy way of doing it was sticking it on bills without requiring so much Treasury scrutiny. Obviously, that is not a progressive way of doing it and it creates problems of trying to switch people from gas to electricity when electricity is more expensive. But it just reveals the fact that sometimes the incentives within government are to try and find the money in an easy place, rather than find it in a way that spreads the cost in the most appropriate way to make things fair. I'm just interested, because perhaps from Tim, do you see any potential movement on that front and do you see the potential for a slightly more rational conversation about where to spread the burden?

TIM: Yes, I think specifically on electricity and gas, you know, I was in the Energy and Climate Department at the time as you said and £9 billion felt like a lot of money, I'm not sure after the last months of borrowing, it feels quite as much these days, but it felt like a rational thing to do at the time but clearly now it is irrational in that we are disincentivising people from using the source of fuel that we want them to use. So I think the government will end up doing it, the real question for me is whether they do that quickly enough. But I think the broader point is that quite often I think we hold the net zero agenda to a standard that we don't hold anything else to. It is this agenda in a hermetically sealed way going to be delivered in a fair way? If you look at the investment numbers from the CCC that are talking about 40 billion a year and not all of that will be public money but even if it were that's what we spend on defence every year and we don't say the defence spending collapses the economy and is unfair for poorer people because we spread the costs looking at the tax and benefits system overall and doing that in a fair way. Now you can debate whether or not we've achieved the level of fairness to which we should aspire but we don't say don't spend this money because it is not fair to do it. But on this net zero agenda we have to be looking at it in a fair way but we have to do it in the broader context of the tax and welfare system overall because I believe there are ways of doing this transition in ways that are fundamentally fair not just to poorer people but to the whole of society where the burdens of cost can sit in the right kinds of places whether that is carbon pricing, whether that's road pricing, whether it's how we spread the costs of the homes transition as well.

RAVI: Great, thank you. Sarah, I want to turn to you to pick up on the question on climate assemblies and ask you a few follow-ups. I think my main question is about the extent to which climate assemblies can actually help shift norms within a given area. So you talked a bit about the benefits to the individuals who participate and I'm sure that's true, but do you see - have you been able to measure - the way in which going through a local climate assembly and then sharing the kind of results creates the different environment for the wider population? Because, for me, that would be particularly impactful, but I don't know what the evidence suggests on it.

SARAH: Yeah, I think there's quite a difference here in terms of different engagement methods. I haven't seen loads of climate assemblies specifically, like proper academic research on that yet because it's kind of still coming through the pipeline but if you're looking for engagement mechanisms that achieve that, then climate assemblies might not be your best way to do it and I think there has been a lot of focus on climate assemblies in recent times perhaps to the detriment of some other engagement methods that might be better placed for achieving changes like that in certain circumstances. So, for example, if you look at participatory budgeting which has been used widely around the world now, with big processes in Lisbon and also in Paris where you are having a certain set of money that you are asking the public how to distribute on climate what you get then is a whole set of ideas from within the community, from community groups, from businesses, from individuals, about how that should be taken forward. Then a whole process of campaign around that and then a public vote and if you are looking for something that really raises the profile of the issue in the area and really galvanises people's creativity and their enthusiasm to do something, then that might be a different process for you to use. What that doesn't give you, depending on what you're looking for, is a sort of detailed kind of quality input into a particular decision that you might be going to take which is where deliberative processes are really useful. That said, we know that people who are involved in climate assemblies both recommend things about how to engage their local communities - I know, for example, that the citizens' jury that looked at social housing in the north recommended having a show home which is retrofitted and that's something that the social housing groups hadn't thought about, that people could come and see it and kind of have a look around it, as a good way of engaging. So you get these ideas that allow you to communicate better coming out of these sorts of processes. But also you get spokespeople. So you get relatable local spokespeople who are often kind of really enthused to keep going in the area and do more. So if you then work with them, both in a communications sense and an outreach sense I think you have some real possibilities but I'm not sure that anyone - an academic has followed that yet and someone has done that and really used that potential yet to know for sure to what extent it makes a difference on citizens' assemblies specifically.

RAVI: And there's a question from Nathan who is asked about the French citizen assembly on climate also rejected carbon taxes, in spite of recommendations. Just wondered about whether you had any reflections on why that happened or what can be learned?

SARAH: So I wasn't at the assembly to know what arguments or why people rejected it but I mean there's two ways to look at that. One is that maybe they supported other alternative policies and you need to have a look at that, and so is there a particular reason you want to go forward with carbon taxes specifically? If you do want to go forward with carbon taxes specifically then looking at why people didn't like them is really important and looking at what that says for how your policy should be shaped and how your policy should be communicated, it shows you the current state of public opinion and what people's concerns are. So without having been more involved in the French assembly, that's what I'd say.

RAVI: OK, great. We're going to try and bring this to a close but I wanted to go around each of you and ask one final question, which is really, if you think about - we've talked about a lot of things we know but a lot of things we don't know in this conversation. I'm interested in if there's one piece of research or one experiment that you would like to run that would help inform this debate about how we win the battle on public acceptance, what would that be? What's the one piece of research or one trial? And this is probably quite selfish because I'm partly thinking about shaping our own work at Nesta! So a difficult question, I should probably give you a minute to think, but if someone has a knee-jerk response?

CHRIS: I've got one, Ravi, and I already said it earlier. My belief is that the fact that we have to decarbonise every home across the country by some means, as yet undetermined, leads me to think that actually it would be better to have these town-wide and city-wide plans that I talked about earlier and I would love to know - I don't know if we could set up a controlled experiment to do this but I would love to know also whether I am right about my belief of having those plans is a tool of good engagement and a way in which we can actually bring people into the discussion about those changes that lie ahead because I did have my eyes opened by the climate assembly process that Sarah organised that actually the people on that assembly were not overly concerned about what the means was to decarbonise their home, which is largely what policy-makers are concerned with, at the moment, is it a heat pump or a hydrogen boiler is largely the discussion that we're having so far, but they were much more concerned about how did the work and the extent to which the people could be engaged in that plan and could have some purchase and some, you know, agency over it, and you know the extent of - the extent of disruption that would come with that. So I wonder whether it would be possible to do a town-wide plan that had that deep engagement and see whether that did change their broader outlook on some of the other climate policies.

RAVI: And, Chris, would you be looking at those local plans for the locality to make some big choices like how to decarbonise homes and whether to go for heat pumps or another technology? Because it does feel like one of the problems is if those options are open, it can be a recipe for inaction, you can see people saying let's not act now, let's wait and see what the right choice is later.

CHRIS: So the neat thing about the UK Climate Assembly was the questions were constrained, which is why I was happy to be part of it, it wasn't about whether to have a net zero policy, because the government had set that, but how it was to be achieved and that is a much more interesting question to ask. So if there's constraint about this - particularly about homes, because we have to decarbonise them, whether you could constrain the question similarly. I often think of the good people of Teesside at this moment. So at the end of the road, if you are employed in the production of hydrogen, it doesn't matter what some person in Whitehall with his energy system model thinks about whether it's efficient or not to use that hydrogen, I think quite rightly you should allow the people of Teesside to decide whether they want to use that hydrogen to keep their homes warm. So the opening of that up and allowing the public to decide how they are employed and the prospects in that region if there is a demand for hydrogen - that kind of thing does matter but we haven't tested that properly.

RAVI: Thank you. Lucy?

LUCY: Yes, I think just following on from Sarah's comments, I think I'd love to do a kind of, 'show don't tell', and if I think about maybe some equivalents in the world of transport, there are huge movements globally, particularly in cities, to reduce the number of cars. So car-free movements. I think one of the things that they do very powerfully to draw attention to the cause is actually to decommission parking spaces and to show what could be done with those spaces, or with those streets. So you'll see street parties, you'll see streets turned into football pitches, you'll see car parking spaces given over to small street cafes and that kind of thing and I think, you know, this is great because it involves those local communities, but also it gives somebody - it gives people in those communities something very kind of visual that they can see, they can engage with, they can really understand what this could mean for them. So I think having some kind of show home or something along those lines, you know, could be an important next step and could also help with engagement.

RAVI: Yes and the engagement can be fun and not just worthy. Sarah?

SARAH: Yes, so just to quickly back up Lucy's point and then I'll share my idea. So the Bristol citizens' assembly, the people there looking at retrofits said we should have a show street or show neighbourhood, where you've done all the houses and it was one step up from the show home idea that came out of the jury for northern England and they said while you are at it you should do a show street, not just a home, so that seems to be a popular idea. My view is quite similar to Chris's. So my dream thing that I would try is a co-design process in a local area. So I would bring together all the different partners in the system, so including the public, but also the people you would want to install things and the various decision-makers involved and get them to work together towards a question like how do you retrofit homes in this area or whatever you want it to be and work it together so you end up with a process that works for everyone and see if collaborating on it like that creates a much better plan that can move forward much quicker and doesn't have many some of the glitches that we've seen in recent times in this area.

RAVI: Right, thank you. Finally, Tim?

TIM: I think what I'd love to see more work on is around the messaging around climate change and how you can better engage the public on that because we know that people care about climate change and there's lots of evidence for that and we know they feel pretty paralysed in the face of it for understandable reasons but we know that also don't understand what they can do about it and there was a great survey recently that asked people to rate nine behaviours on what impacts on climate they would have and the answers were pretty much all the wrong way around. But why should people know if no-one has told them? But the government is allergic to do any sort of coherent messaging around this. If you Google "Government process on climate change," you don't get very much. So it would be great to explain some of these things to people, not in order to tell them what to do but to enable them to turn their concern or private action into something that is really informed.

RAVI: Thank you very much, Tim, and thank you to all of the panellists. Lucy, Sarah, Chris. Thank you for everybody joining us. Next week, obviously all the major political leaders will be thinking about this sort of question in their own context because it's difficult in the UK, but it's even more difficult in particular in other places. So I hope this conversation is one that we can continue and thank you all for joining us today and I'll leave it there before I lose my voice completely! Thank you very much, everybody, goodbye.