Kerry McCarthy

I can certainly reassure my hon. Friend. I have received quite a lot of correspondence on that, which MPs have passed on from their constituents. I have answered written questions—which are in the public domain—and replied to queries on both those points. I will try to express as clearly and vehemently as I can that we have no plans for SRM. On the supposed chemtrails issue, that is a term used by some people who claim that the white trails seen behind high-altitude aircraft on clear days contain undisclosed chemical agents intended for a covert atmospheric spraying programme. They are, in fact, as my hon. Friend said, contrails, which form when warm, moist aircraft exhaust fumes mix with cold air at altitude. Under certain atmospheric conditions, contrails can persist and spread out to form cirrus-like clouds before disappearing. There is no deliberate spraying of chemicals in the skies over the UK for climate modification. We are not in favour of SRM and have no plans to change that position; I will say more on that in a moment, but first I want to add a little more on greenhouse gas removals. Making Britain a clean energy superpower is one of the five missions of this Government, delivering clean power by 2030 and accelerating progress towards net zero across the economy by 2050. I note the comments from the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings) about the UK being off track to do that. We will be publishing our carbon budget delivery plan by October; as she said, the previous Government were taken to court for failing to produce adequate policies to match the ambition. Obviously, there is no point in setting targets unless they can be delivered. We will set out our plan in due course, and then talk about the seventh carbon budget and meeting our nationally determined contributions. We must do everything we can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—that is our starting point. We need that effort to be shared across all Government Departments, and we need everyone to play a role.