Department of Energy and Climate Change

DECC is helping and incentivising business and the public sector to reduce their emissions through a range of key policies and mechanisms.

Businesses

Measures to incentivise and support businesses to reduce their energy use include:

• Market mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from larger organisations – including the EU Emissions Trading System, the Climate Change Levy and Climate Change Agreements, and the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme;
• Providing information, advice and support to help organisations take action to reduce their emissions, in particular through Business Link, guidance on corporate reporting and the Carbon Trust who provide advice (website, helpline, and site surveys), carbon management, organisational and product footprinting services;
• Providing financial support through to help small and medium enterprises to invest in energy saving projects through interest-free loans and the Enhanced Capital Allowances scheme;
• Voluntary Business Energy Efficiency Agreements (BEEAs) with the major energy suppliers to promote energy efficiency and energy services to SMEs;
• The Carbon Budgets framework and the carbon aspects of the Sustainable Operations on the Government Estate (SOGE) framework;
• Guidance for UK businesses and organisations on how to measure and report their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was published by Defra / DECC in October 2009. The voluntary guidance explains how businesses and organisations can measure and report their GHG emissions as well as set targets to reduce them. The guidance is aimed at all sizes of business as well as public and third sector organisations.

Public sector

The public sector in England has great social impact as well as influence across the economy. Over the whole of the UK the public sector employs 6 million people, owns a tenth of all UK land and has significant purchasing power – around £150 billion per year. The sector is directly responsible for around 3% of the UK’s emissions, with £2.6 billion spent on electricity and gas in buildings in 2009. DECC leads on a number of policies designed to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions across the public sector.

The Prime Minister has announced that carbon emissions from central government will be cut by 10% in the next 12 months.

DECC has introduced a Carbon Budgets framework to manage the UK’s carbon emissions. As part of this, all departments have been allocated a share of the budget to cover their own emissions from their buildings and estate. This will ensure that every department has a clear responsibility in playing its part to help meet the budgets. Each department has recently published a Carbon Reduction Delivery Plan, detailing how these reductions will be achieved.

Sustainable Operations on the Government Estate (SOGE)

The SOGE framework is an annual reporting system for a range of sustainability targets and indicators, including carbon, waste, water and biodiversity. DECC leads on the carbon-related elements, while Defra leads on all other elements. The Efficiency and Reform Group within the Cabinet Office (formerly the Office of Government Commerce [OGC]) is responsible for annual monitoring, reporting and collation of data.

Salix Finance

Salix Finance is a private company, funded by DECC and the devolved administrations, to enable the public sector to find the up-front capital investment for energy saving projects. It offers interest free loans to public sector organisations for energy efficiency investments.

Low Carbon Technology Programme

The Central Government Low Carbon Technology Programme is a capital funding programme to support central government departments and their agencies – based in England and that report on SOGE - to achieve carbon emission reductions and cost savings in heat, energy or transport, through the deployment of low-carbon technologies. Funding has been provided to invest in innovative energy efficiency measures to cut emissions and energy bills in central government departments. Successful solutions can then be replicated elsewhere in the public sector.

Other energy efficiency measures

In addition, all government departments are also part of the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, regardless of their size. The Carbon Trust provides support to the public sector to identify and implement cost-effective carbon reduction.

Data on carbon emissions from public sector buildings

According to the UK Inventory of emissions, end user emissions for 2008 for the public administration estate were responsible for around 3% of the UK’s total emissions. DECC has sought to break down emissions from public sector buildings by different sub-sectors. The baseline has been calculated by scaling up data from the Carbon Trust’s Carbon Management Programmes it has run with public sector bodies, as well as sub-sectoral data on emissions and energy spend for specific areas of the public sector (e.g. Central Government data captured through the Sustainable Operations on the Government Estate (SOGE) Framework).  This has been validated thorough comparison with data from Display Energy Certificates (which cover around 70% of public sector buildings) and top-down UK inventory data. This provides a best estimate of:

The breakdown of emissions per part of the public sector has been calculated using the sources above, to show the relative contributions of each to the total:

*to nearest 100 ktCO2e

#Numbers do not sum due to rounding