As the UK’s embattled Chancellor of the Exchequer ponders her options ahead of the upcoming autumn budget, including the news that the National Institute of Economic and Social Research believes that the government is on track to miss its self-imposed borrowing rules by £41.2 Billion, might I suggest that she re-visits the Government’s 2025 Spending Review?

This tells us that “Making Britain a clean energy superpower is one of the government’s five missions, as set out in the Plan for Change”. I appreciate that it will be embarrassing to ditch this particular mission, given the noise that the Government has made about it, but does she really have any choice? In any event, it shouldn’t be too difficult to make a dramatic U-turn – our current Labour government has had so much practice that it should be able to manage it with aplomb.

Why might it be necessary? Well, quite apart from the damage that is being caused to the UK’s environment, and the way it is driving up electricity prices, which is undermining the Chancellor’s growth agenda, it is increasingly obvious that is unaffordable. The Spending Review touches on only a few of the costs, and for fuller information I urge the reader to visit The True Cost of Net Zero and particularly the comments below the article, where I have tried to maintain a running commentary of the numerous announcements of increasing volumes of funding the government is throwing at all things Net Zero. However, here are some quick fixes for the Chancellor:

Scrap Great British Energy and the £8.3 Billion it is budgeted to spend during this Parliament,

Scrap the £9.4 Billion included in the Spending Review period that is to be wasted on Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage.

Scrap the £2.6 Billion that is to be wasted on decarbonising transport during the next four financial years (including the “£1.4 billion to support the continued uptake of electric vehicles, including vans and HGVs, and £400 million to support the rollout of charging infrastructure”).

Scrap the money that is to be wasted on funding Sustainable Aviation Fuel (which is said to be £63 million for starters).

Take away Official Development Assistance programming allocations from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (scheduled over the next three years to be £247 million, £256 million, and £266 million respectively). When the UK is strapped for cash, it doesn’t need to throw money at the Global Environment Facility and the Green Climate Fund.

Scrap the £80 million to be spent on “supporting” floating offshore wind deployment in Port Talbot.

Scrap the “over £3 billion” of funding “anchoring the supply chain of zero emission vehicles, batteries and ultra-low and zero-carbon emission aircraft”.

Ensure that the 7th Allocation Round (AR7) of the Contracts for Difference scheme strikes contract prices that are below existing prices (after all, aren’t we told that renewable energy is both the cheapest form of energy and that it’s getting cheaper?). There should be no need to offer subsidies to renewable energy companies for the next twenty years if the Government’s claims are correct. We know that things aren’t going well in this respect in Germany, but since our Government wouldn’t lie to us about such things, we should be able to manage quite nicely in this regard in the UK without subsidies.

Prevent any more Hydrogen Allocation Rounds, which are already wasting at least £2 billion of taxpayers’ money.

Start to issue new licences for North Sea oil and gas exploration – if you’re serious about growing the economy, then it makes sense to cease to hamstring those parts of the energy sector that can stand on their own two feet and actually make a contribution to the Exchequer rather than taking lots of money from it.

These are just a few ideas, dear Chancellor. I am sure you have lots of clever people working in the Treasury, and I do hope that they are keeping track of the largesse that is continuing to be bestowed on the Net Zero gravy train. Assuming that they are, then they should be able to identify savings well beyond the few I have identified above. If you once remove Government from the clutches of a cult, then balancing the books should become substantially more straightforward.

4 Comments

  1. Thanks Mark. It’s obvious really, but I rather doubt if the Chancellor will even consider it. It’s a point I make whenever I see the opportunity in the Speccie and elsewhere. Here’s a text that I adapt to fit the particular requirements of the article on which I’m commenting:

    A huge saving for our beleaguered Government would be the repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act and the termination of the absurd, disastrous and completely pointless Net Zero policy – almost certainly the biggest and most expensive project undertaken by a British government in peacetime. Unlike every other problem we’re facing, it would be a simple step with no serious downside, except of course for many vested interests and for the multitude of well-funded people employed comfortably in the green lobby. Yet it would eliminate hundreds of billions of pounds of current and future Government expenditure and, if not the solution to our current economic woes, would make a huge contribution to ensuring that matters didn’t get any worse.

    It always gets a lot of support.

    Liked by 3 people

  2. The present lot don’t seem to be aware that, if you want your horse to work, you need to look after it. The choice to bump up a tax on jobs is obviously absurd, for example. Lowering the threshold for NI could hardly have been better chosen if you were looking for a measure to put a lot of part-timers out of work. If you tax profit, not jobs, you encourage investment, and that thing beginning with g that the government are laser-focused on, or whatever they said.

    In climate policy, some tax cuts would be a great idea – such as in the North Sea, plus there is the carbon tax which is another jobs killer. Sometimes less is more.

    Then we could save a few quid by canning the Chagos leaseback scheme.

    A fool could have written a better budget than our incumbent Chancellor.

    PS. When I’m Chancellor, I’m going to have a 100% tax on all subsidy income.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. There are two far more significant areas for cheap, UK produced, energy sources than issuing new gas and oil licences for offshore exploration. First is fracking for gas on the mainland. There is a great deal of disinformation about the harmful effects, but with enough to supply entire UK demand for 20 to 100 years, it is worth looking into. Second is exploiting the coal under the North Sea. It is estimated there is 3 to 23 trillion tonnes down there. Quite a lot when you consider 1 trillion tonnes is equivalent to over 100 years of current global production. The UK could extract huge amounts by a process of gasification. No need to have any people in the deep mines.

    Note than the difference UK will make to global emissions is insignificantly small. Further global emissions have not yet peaked, yet the 1.5 °C target requires a 43% (CO2 IPCC AR6 2022) or a 55% GHG UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2018 based on IPCC SR1.5) emissions reduction. If the decade started on 01/01/2020, the world has already bust both targets. Global GHG emissions were 57.1 GtCO2e (give or take 2 or 3) in 2023, of which the UK contributed 0.383 GtCO2e, less than 0.7%.

    Liked by 4 people

  4. Kevin: two very important opportunities – almost completely overlooked. Many thanks.

    PS: as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the Paris Agreement’s ‘well below 2ºC’ target will, if the IPCC emission reduction requirement is correct, be comfortably exceeded.

    Liked by 1 person

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