It is not exactly difficult to work out who Hannah Scott would like to see step into Downing Street. Last April, aged 27, she became the chief executive of Oxfordshire Greentech, a group of businesses working with the University of Oxford and local government to commercialise technologies that help fight climate change.
The role has given her a ringside seat from which to witness the reaction from climate tech businesses to Rishi Sunak’s cooling net-zero rhetoric. In September last year, Sunak weakened several policies intended to help the country meet its climate goals, most notably pushing back the ban on new petrol cars from 2030 to 2035.
“What does that say to innovators working in the low carbon transport system?” she exclaims in exasperation. “It says their innovations won’t be wanted for another five years.”
Sunak also softened the government’s efforts to phase out gas boilers, targeting an 80 per cent reduction in their installation by 2035 rather than a ban. He has said these measures are a “pragmatic” effort to shield households from the cost of net zero, claiming in his opening campaign speech that he had triumphed over “environmental dogma.”
Scott claims that Sunak’s portrayal of net zero as a cost has elided the fact that it is an investment that will drive economic growth. Last year, businesses helping to fight climate change grew 9 per cent, according to research by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a not-for-profit organisation — far faster than the economy as a whole.
Advertisement
Estimates vary as to whether getting to net zero will increase or decrease GDP. The Climate Change Committee said in 2021 it could reduce it by 0.6 per cent, which its former chief economist Mike Thompson described as “a pretty good deal to avoid the effects of climate change”. The data consultancy Cambridge Econometrics, meanwhile, has calculated that it could actually increase GDP by two to three per cent, by reducing reliance on expensive fossil fuels.
“There’s not an awareness in government that this is a strength for Britain,” Scott says. “There’s a huge amount that these companies can contribute to the UK economy, but it just doesn’t feel like there’s a huge amount out there to support their growth at the moment.”
She adds that the last year has been a “tough time” for her members, and that many have struggled to raise funds. “Government yo-yoing” is only one factor that Scott says has scared investors away from putting their money in climate-focused companies. Another is the rough economic climate. She says it has made investors impatient, eager to make a quick return on software companies rather than wait around for her members to deploy solar panels, EV chargers, and other time-consuming hardware.
That hardware isn’t just limited to renewables. One of Scott’s members, EAV, is building electric cargo bikes with containers on the back, to replace the delivery trucks congesting inner-city roads. Another, Oxwash, is doing commercial customers’ laundry in high-tech washing machines that minimise microplastic pollution, while Zeta is deploying LED lighting and electric vehicle charging points.
Despite representing all these technology providers, Scott’s background is not in engineering or science but in the humanities. She studied music at Oxford, which she decided was “interesting, but not purposeful”, then had a “lovely little existential crisis” about what to do with her life. Climate change was another thing to worry about, but it did at least answer that question. “It got to the point where I had read so much about the climate crisis that I was like, right, I need to do something about this.”
Advertisement
After completing a master’s degree in development and the environment at the University of Sussex, she joined the sustainability consultancy Bioregional, of which Oxfordshire Greentech was originally a part. She managed the network for a year, then decided it would not reach its potential unless she worked on it full-time, as its chief executive.
“It’s a small organisation, so it wasn’t like becoming the CEO of Nando’s or something, but it was very daunting.”
Talking spiritedly of all the green initiatives she is involved in — one effort to decarbonise Oxford’s industries, another to connect clean tech companies across northern Europe — she gives the impression of having more than the usual number of hours in her day.
She sees much in Labour’s programme that would help her members. The party has said it would create a national wealth fund to invest in green technologies, and has also said it would reform the planning system to make it easier to build renewables. But as much she anticipates these changes in policy, she equally holds out hope for a change of tone.
“The next government has to be creating a powerful narrative, a vision of a future economy that is happier, healthier, greener, so that net zero isn’t this thing that no one understands, and that people think will only cost them loads of money,” she says.
