OPINION: If I were advising the Government on sustainability this week, this is what I’d say.
As the Labour Party gathers in Liverpool this week, much of the conversation is understandably about growth. How do we get Britain investing again? How do we improve productivity, create good jobs, rebuild our industrial base and make British businesses more competitive?
These are exactly the conversations we should be having, but if I were advising the Government this week, there is another subject I would want firmly inside that growth agenda: sustainability.
I don't mean a separate green agenda, another set of targets or another layer of reporting for businesses already dealing with cost, complexity and regulation. I mean making sustainability part of the economic strategy, because when it is approached properly it can help businesses grow, reduce costs, improve productivity, strengthen customer relationships, innovate and become more resilient. And yes, it can reduce our impact on the environment at the same time.
That is what I mean when I talk about Sustainability without the Noise. Sustainability is most useful when we stop treating it as an ideological position or simply another compliance requirement and start treating it as a business discipline.
We shouldn't be afraid to talk about the environment.
I spend a lot of time arguing that sustainability needs to be separated from some of the noise surrounding climate change and net zero. But separating sustainability from that debate doesn't mean pretending the environmental problem isn't real.
We have just experienced the UK's warmest summer on record. The average UK temperature during summer 2026 was provisionally 16.5°C, England experienced its driest July on record and the Met Office estimates that the season's mean temperature was made around 130 times more likely by human-induced climate change.
At the same time, El Niño is strengthening globally. NOAA currently expects a very strong event during the coming autumn and winter, although precisely what that means for individual countries, including the UK, is much harder to predict.
You don't have to adopt a particular political identity to acknowledge any of this, and businesses shouldn't have to choose between caring about the environment and caring about growth. In fact, I think that is one of the least helpful choices we have created in the sustainability debate.
The more interesting question is how we make doing one help us achieve the other.
Put sustainability inside the growth strategy.
For too long, we have talked about economic policy over here and sustainability policy over there, but businesses don't operate like that. Energy is a cost. Materials are a cost. Waste is a cost. Transport is a cost. Supply-chain disruption is a cost. Losing a tender because you cannot provide the environmental information a customer requires is a commercial cost. Increasingly, carbon itself is a cost.
When we measure environmental impact properly, we often expose inefficiency that was already sitting inside the business. It might be excessive energy consumption, wasted materials, inefficient logistics, outdated processes or commercial arrangements between customers and suppliers that nobody has questioned for years.
This is something I see repeatedly in businesses. Mapping emissions gives you another way of looking at how the organisation actually operates. It can reveal operational waste, structural inefficiency and unnecessary cost that has simply become accepted over time. Sustainability_without_the_nois…
Reducing those things can reduce emissions, but it can also improve margins and productivity. That is why I would stop presenting sustainability to British businesses primarily as something they are being asked to do for government or to satisfy somebody else's targets. I would help them use it to run better businesses.
That means sustainability belongs inside our productivity, industrial, innovation and growth strategies, not sitting alongside them as a separate policy objective.
Good regulation should change behaviour, not create administration.
This becomes particularly relevant as the UK prepares for the introduction of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, in January 2027.
I support the principle behind CBAM. If British manufacturers are being asked to invest in cleaner production and face a domestic carbon price, it makes little sense if they can simply be undercut by higher-carbon production from countries without an equivalent carbon cost. We haven't reduced global emissions if we simply move production, jobs and emissions somewhere else.
That is the carbon leakage problem CBAM is designed to address. From January, specified imports of aluminium, cement, fertiliser, hydrogen and iron and steel will face a carbon price designed to be comparable with that borne by UK production.
The principle makes sense. The challenge is how we implement it.
Importers will need to understand which goods qualify, maintain records, understand the emissions embodied within those goods and, where appropriate, obtain verified emissions information from overseas manufacturers. Registered businesses will then need to report their position and pay the tax due.
This is where I would set Government a very simple test: can we achieve the environmental objective without creating unnecessary administration for business?
I think we can.
Customs data already exists. Commodity codes already exist. Import records already exist. Carbon pricing information exists and emissions information is becoming increasingly available. We should be designing systems around the assumption that technology does the heavy lifting, rather than asking people to manually move the same information between spreadsheets, government systems, customers, suppliers and advisers.
My principle would be to collect information once, make it interoperable and reuse it wherever possible. The success of CBAM should ultimately be judged by whether it protects against carbon leakage, supports fair competition and creates an incentive for cleaner production, not by how many forms businesses complete.
That distinction matters because good regulation should change behaviour, not create administration.
Give businesses useful information, not another reporting problem
There is an interesting alignment here with something the Government is already saying. Its current corporate reporting reforms talk about simplifying reporting, removing duplication and using digital technology to reduce administrative burdens.
I would apply exactly the same philosophy to sustainability.
We need businesses to have better environmental information, but having better information doesn't necessarily mean producing longer reports. For most SMEs, I would start with much more practical questions. Where are your emissions and your biggest environmental impacts? Where are you wasting energy, materials or money? What are your customers beginning to ask you for? Where could environmental requirements affect your ability to trade? And, perhaps most importantly, where might doing something differently create commercial value?
Give a management team answers to those questions and sustainability becomes useful. Give them another hundred-page framework and it becomes something to delegate.
Government should be helping businesses establish enough credible data to make better decisions, not encouraging measurement for measurement's sake. That is also why I have always argued that we shouldn't wait for perfect sustainability data. Useful information that allows a business to make a better decision today is more valuable than perfect information that arrives three years too late. In Sustainability without the Noise, I describe this as being properly informed before acting: useful data, rather than perfect data, should provide the foundation for prioritisation
Use Government's buying power intelligently.
The same principle should apply to public procurement. Government has enormous purchasing power and can use it to encourage better environmental performance, but we have to be careful about what we actually reward.
Environmental requirements are increasingly part of tenders and supply chains. That can be positive because it creates a commercial incentive for businesses to understand and improve their environmental performance. But if participating in public procurement means an SME has to navigate expensive certification, consultancy and complex reporting simply to prove that it is taking sustainability seriously, we risk rewarding businesses with the biggest compliance departments rather than those making the most meaningful progress.
I would rather ask something simpler. Does the business understand its impact? Is it taking credible action to improve it? And can it evidence the progress it is making?
That gives businesses an incentive to improve without pretending that every organisation should be in exactly the same place. Some businesses will move quickly, others will take longer, and the right level of investment will depend on their sector, customers, margins and commercial circumstances.
Progress matters more than perfection.
Make environmental improvement commercially valuable.
Ultimately, businesses respond to incentives, and I think this is where we have the greatest opportunity.
If we want environmental performance to improve at scale, we should make improvement commercially valuable. A manufacturer that reduces energy consumption should see lower costs. A logistics business that eliminates unnecessary journeys should save fuel and improve productivity. A supplier that can demonstrate lower embodied emissions should increasingly have a commercial advantage where its customers face carbon costs. A company developing lower-carbon products should be able to access markets where customers value them.
And businesses investing in cleaner production in Britain should not find themselves commercially disadvantaged against higher-carbon imports.
That is when sustainability becomes powerful, because it stops being something businesses are told they should do and becomes something that helps them compete.
This is also why I think we need to move the sustainability conversation beyond efficiency alone. Reducing waste and energy consumption matters, but sustainability can also support growth by helping businesses retain customers, access new markets, develop new products and strengthen commercial relationships.
If Government can create an environment in which the lower-carbon decision is increasingly also the commercially attractive decision, we won't need to spend as much time trying to persuade businesses to act. The economics will increasingly do the persuading for us.
Sustainability doesn't have to be ideological.
This is where I think the sustainability conversation has become unnecessarily difficult. We have spent too much time arguing about end states and not enough time talking about the journey.
Net zero has become a political argument. Sustainability doesn't need to be.
Every business consumes resources. Every business produces some form of waste. Every business depends to some extent on energy, infrastructure, suppliers, customers and a functioning natural environment. Understanding those dependencies and managing them better is simply good business.
Some companies will move faster than others. Some will initially see sustainability primarily as compliance. Others will discover opportunities for new products, new customers and new markets. Both are legitimate, and businesses can move from one position to the other as their capability and understanding develops. Sustainability_without_the_nois…
The role of Government shouldn't be to force every business into the same sustainability strategy. It should create the conditions that allow businesses to understand the risks, identify the opportunities and make informed decisions.
And if I had ten minutes at Labour Party Conference this week, that is probably the point I would want to leave with the room.
I don't want a greener economy instead of a stronger economy. I want us to build a stronger economy that uses less energy, wastes fewer resources, develops better technology, has more resilient supply chains, supports competitive British manufacturing and produces fewer emissions as a consequence.
I want environmental data to help businesses find inefficiency. I want carbon pricing to encourage investment rather than simply create cost. I want regulation to achieve its objective without creating an industry around compliance. I want British businesses investing in cleaner production to be able to compete fairly with imports, and I want sustainability to help businesses find customers, develop products, reduce costs and create jobs.
Because the real opportunity isn't choosing between economic growth and environmental progress. It is designing policy so that, increasingly, the same decisions deliver both.
That is what I would be asking Government to pursue this week.
And that, for me, is Sustainability without the Noise.
You can download a free copy of my book here: https://notch.eco/sustainabilitywithoutthenoise/
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