Dr. Pete Lunn:

I will take those points in reverse order. I do not know of any evaluation of sectoral compacts. I am unaware of any published evaluation that would tell us whether they are successful. I do not know. They accord with the idea that this is a problem for collective action and that trying to solve it collectively will be beneficial, which I believe is true. We have to be so careful. As an ESRI researcher who does behavioural research, I work across multiple policy areas in which consumer interests are at odds with commercial interests and in which there is pressure to regulate while the industry desperately asks to be allowed get everyone together to sort the problem out between them. In my experience, nine times out of ten that is an excuse to delay. People will find ways to delay. We can delay food labelling, which is desperately needed, despite there being a ton of research suggesting it would make a real difference to people's diet and health. It is getting delayed further and further by that kind of approach. Perhaps we can afford that. We may be able to afford five or ten years more of people not having decent nutritional labelling, although some people would dispute that. However, we definitely cannot afford such delay on climate. Given that experience, I know we sometimes need to be very wary of thinking we can find voluntary approaches and not have to get the big stick out. That is my honest response.

As concerns the yellow vests, where you move to change things radically and quickly before people have joined the dots up, have understood what you are trying to do and that a collective effort is under way to solve a major social problem, it is not a surprise if you run into massive opposition. It is a warning to us about how to go about this. I cannot say I know what the solution is but it can be seen where things did not go well in that case. We can see some of that at the moment in the opposition to some active travel schemes. People are failing to notice these measures are a very important part of climate policy. They may not see that a particular local change joins up those dots and that other localities are doing the same. A lot of that is what is at the heart of what we are discussing here, the idea of getting a more collective communication.