Newsletters from No 10: 6 April 2010

Dear friends

Gordon Brown has announced that the General Election will be on May 6th. I wanted to let you know that as a Special Adviser I shall be resigning at the end of today and from tomorrow will be joining Labour's campaign team.

This is therefore my last email from Downing St in the present Parliament. I hope you have found these communications useful. Over the past year or so I've been glad to report on what I believe has been a series of very significant developments in Government energy and climate change policy, implementing the commitments in the Climate Change Act and the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan. There remains important work to do, not least under the Energy Markets Assessment whose initial findings we published at the Budget - and in the next few days we still have a vital Energy Bill to complete. But over the last year we have put in place a series of policy frameworks - on government carbon budgets, infrastructure planning, domestic energy efficiency, large-scale and small-scale renewables, nuclear, gas, carbon capture and storage and coal, the transmission network, smart grid and smart meters, electric vehicles, adaptation and more - which will lay the foundation for what the Prime Minister has fairly described as a revolution both in the UK energy system and in our overall approach to climate policy. At the same time, as I've been reporting recently, the Government's commitment to an active industrial strategy, backed by new funding, has led to a huge advance in the prospects for low carbon manufacturing and industry in this country. The wave of inward investments in the energy supply chain we've seen over recent weeks alone are testament I think to that.

At the same time the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband have worked very hard to make progress in international climate negotiations and implementation, particularly in assistance to developing countries. As the prospectus we published last week noted, despite initial reactions to Copenhagen, there is reason for guarded optimism about the international picture. With all major economies in the world now having emissions reduction targets and plans, it's possible now that the curve of hitherto inexorably rising global emissions can be bent downwards in the next decade. It will take an immense effort; it is by no means secured; it will then need to be followed by much faster progress - but there are now commitments to which governments can be held and on which they can be helped. That was not true a year ago. And efforts to strengthen and deepen those commitments continue.

So it's been a busy year. I've enjoyed writing these emails and hope you've found them useful. I've been very glad to get feedback and responses and am grateful to all those who've replied. I look forward to getting back in touch after the election! In the meantime I hope UK-based recipients don't mind if I send the odd email from my personal account during the campaign.

From tomorrow my email address will be [email protected].

With my very best wishes

Michael Jacobs


Michael Jacobs
Special Adviser to the Prime Minister
10 Downing St
London SW1A 2AA