Green Investment Bank
 |
|
| Formation | 2012 |
|---|---|
| Type | Public limited company |
| Headquarters | Edinburgh |
|
Region served
|
United Kingdom |
|
Key people
|
Shaun Kingsbury (Chief Executive) |
|
Parent organisation
|
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills |
| Website | greeninvestmentbank |
UK Green Investment Bank plc is a Green Bank created in 2012 by the UK government to attract private funds for the financing of the private sector's investments related to environmental preservation and improvement. It is structured as a public limited company and is owned by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). Its headquarters are in Edinburgh, where it is also registered, and it has a secondary office in London.
As a result of the Climate Change Act 2008, the United Kingdom became legally committed to significantly reducing its carbon emissions by 2050. More importantly, the Act committed the UK to generating a significantly higher percentage of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.
A non-partisan, House of Commons committee on climate change was established to study and recommend ways of meeting the country's obligations. The committee reported that for a new, low-carbon business and government infrastructure to be established, the necessary investment would range between £200 billion and £1 trillion over the next two decades.
The committee further stated that since traditional sources of capital for investment in green infrastructure could not provide even half that amount by 2025, there would be a funding gap that needed to be covered by the state budget.
In 2009, two reports were published advocating the creation of a state-backed infrastructure bank to provide financing to green projects. The first, entitled "Accelerating Green Infrastructure Financing: Outline proposals for UK green bonds and infrastructure bank" was published in March 2009 by Climate Change Capital and E3G. The second, entitled "Delivering a 21st Century Infrastructure for Britain" was published by Policy Exchange in September 2009 and was written by Dieter Helm, James Wardlaw and Ben Caldecott. These proposals were then contained in the manifestos of each of the main political parties for the 2010 UK General Election.
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