The Committee on Climate Change (CCC), an independent non-departmental public body formed under the Climate Change Act of 2008 to advise not only the House of Commons but also the devolved parliaments of the nations on how best to tackle the climate crisis, is chaired by a Tory, Lord Deben. It has highlighted that current policy on buildings continues to lag behind what is needed. An emission reduction of up to 18% overall could be the result of an effective retrofitting of homes to make them more energy efficient – more than three quarters of the emissions in question are from domestic homes. The same conclusion that retrofitting of houses is crucial has been echoed by Onward, a centre-right think tank that produced a paper entitled Costing the Earth on the subject of tackling climate change, as well as the Green Alliance, who argue for scaling up the domestic supply chain for “deep retrofit” (costed at £300m) and investing an additional £1 billion of public capital every year which they calculate will mobilise a further £3.5 billion in private investment.

The Green Alliance also proposes Natural Infrastructure Schemes to create a market in avoided costs. These would, for example, reward land owners for activities that reduce flood risk, improve water quality and sequester carbon like planting trees and creating wetland habitats. There are calls for market-based solutions from all quarters, even from organisations traditionally seen as centre-left.

Meanwhile, a lot of the more ambitious proposals on reforestation are coming from the centre-right. Take the proposal for a “Forest of Britain”, a single, unbroken, two-mile wide line of protected natural habitats from John O’Groats to Land’s End, via the east of Wales. Or a Nature in the City Act, something which would contain a range of measures to protect declining species and enhance the built environment including implementing a programme of ‘rewilding’ of public green spaces, apportioning a certain area of each park to the stewardship of local schools or wildlife trusts and introducing payments to local authorities for the provision of environmental services. Both of these ideas came from Policy Exchange, perhaps the leading centre-right think tank in the UK.

With there being a consensus being reached between left and right on not only the need to tackle climate change but on a lot of the means of doing so, the path toward the most sustainable economic recovery from the Covid-19 crisis possible begins to come into focus.

To drill down a little further, the impact thus far has fallen hardest on small to medium sized enterprises, and correspondingly, the owners and operators of smaller businesses and their employees.

Percentage of companies currently trading, paused trading or ceased trading as compared to the start of the Covid crisis:

Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/coronavirusandtheeconomicimpactsontheuk24september2020

In terms of how this has impacted employment, overall the picture is misleadingly comforting for the UK. The unemployment rate countrywide is 4.1% as of July 2020, which is astonishingly low, all things considering . Yes, furlough would have helped keep this number lower than it might have been, but still, 4% is healthier than you might imagine. The figures are impressive, so long as you dig down only generally and nationwide: unemployment was 3.85% at the end of 2019, so the impact of Covid so far on total unemployment is only to increase it by 0.3%. 76.5% of all people between 16 and 64 in the UK are in employment, which is actually 0.4% higher than this time last year.

The problem here comes when you drill down by age. For 18 to 24 year olds, employment decreased by 146,000 in Q2 of 2020, a record decrease for this age group in a single quarter. Employment numbers by age group is steady for almost every group apart from those under 25. This has me worried that this generation of young people are bearing the brunt of the Covid crisis economic fallout without this even being widely known, never mind something being done to ameliorate the problem.

We need small businesses and young people to be at the forefront of reversing the economic crisis – and if we think about this in sustainability terms, it becomes even more important. It will be small businesses in emerging sectors who will be the innovators in terms of making sure the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is green and sustainable; that 18 to 24 year old demographic will be the ones who in the near future will have to lead the charge toward net zero in the decades ahead.

This is a big problem that isn’t being talked about enough. How can we affect a green Covid recovery that helps small businesses as well as getting more young people back into employment? Project Cygnus is looking at ways to bring this all together.