picking up the pieces – Inside track

Labour’s pledge to spend £28 billion a year on its Green Prosperity Plan was announced by Rachel Reeves in 2021 (“I am committing the next Labour government to an additional £28 billion of capital investment in our country’s green transition for each and every year of this decade. I will be a responsible chancellor. I will be Britain’s first green chancellor”). It insulated the party from hard questions about its environmental policies and was a bold statement of intent, however fuzzy the details. We now need to ask some hard questions of the party.  

1. What is Labour’s economic vision? There is a sense in the country that nothing works: our infrastructure is crumbling, our public services are in a terrible state and we are stuck on what Lord Stern calls a “path of low investment, low productivity and low growth”. The £28 billion was about net zero, but it was also, as Rachel Reeves wrote nine months ago, “the centrepiece of Labour’s economic programme… This plan will catalyse the investment required to equip Britain’s workers to make and do more. As other countries race ahead with strategic investment in the industries of the future, Britain risks losing the race.” Indeed. What now?

The problems the £28 billion was intended to address have not gone away. The need for serious investment has not gone away. The original Green Prosperity Plan was a promise to tackle the UK’s deep seated economic problems. It was a sign to investors that a Labour government would rebuild the country and compete with countries across the world that are embracing rapid decarbonisation to revive and modernise their economies. What is the vision now? There has to be something more than sticking with spurious fiscal rules.

2. Is Labour still committed to delivering net zero and the UK’s 2030 NDC (nationally determined contribution to averting climate breakdown)? The government is off track, as the March update to Green Alliance’s net zero policy tracker will show again. But Labour does not have fully worked up plans across all shadow departments to close the carbon gap and, in power, it will now have to do so with much less money.

3. What is the plan for nature and farming? We have argued for a £1 billion a year investment in decarbonising land and restoring nature. Without extra money, it will be much harder to meet the UK’s nature and climate targets; or at least, to meet them without the sort of farmer protests that have erupted in the EU. Shadow Defra minister Steve Reed has set out strong ambitions on nature and he deserves great credit for resisting the government’s disgraceful attempt to weaken nutrient neutrality rules. But, as things stand, Labour’s policies for nature, either domestically or internationally, do not match the government’s in ambition.

4. The UN estimates that extracting and processing resources causes half the world’s carbon emissions and 90 per cent of biodiversity loss. Domestically, inefficient resource use not only makes it harder to achieve net zero, it is a drag on productivity. What is Labour’s plan for cutting resource use and moving to a circular economy?

5. What does Keir Starmer mean when he says he will “bulldoze planning”? When he attacks planning my mind goes back to 2010 and Eric Pickles describing planning as “the last outpost of Albanian Communism”. Fourteen years on and, after quite a few bulldozers, planning remains a convenient scapegoat, but hard to reform.

Does Labour really believe that if you remove planning restrictions, house builders will build enough good quality homes, that skills and supply shortages in the energy industry will end, and that opposition to new infrastructure will melt away? The failure of HS2, which was outside the planning system, suggests our difficulties in building things will not be resolved by “bulldozing planning”. What is needed is not yet more planning liberalisation, but more and better planning, both for housing and energy.

6. How much courage does Labour have? In opposition, the answer is clearly not much. That is understandable. Labour is better at losing elections than winning them. But, whoever wins the election will need courage to deliver the changes the country and the world needs. This has to be the decade of action on climate and nature if we are to pass on a liveable planet to future generations. It is as simple as that.

I do not suppose it will be easy to put environmental policies centre stage. There is a lot going on, both internationally (wars, the rise of populism etc) and domestically. A Labour government will face stiff resistance to progressive environmental policies, whether from vested interests (see the industry resistance to the clean heat market mechanism) or the climate sceptic right wing, egged on by the press.

But going green is not a distraction from addressing other challenges, it is the essential precondition of restoring the UK economy, restoring living standards, improving health outcomes, preventing wars, averting the need for mass migration etc, etc. We have set out how green policies can improve lives and Keir Starmer has indicated in the past that he gets it.

Will he follow through in government, if he is elected? There can be no substitute for leadership from No.10, and that has been lacking for some time. 

I do not despair. The pared back Green Prosperity Plan has welcome commitments on energy efficiency (a promise to retrofit five million homes in five years, more than ten times the current rate), clean power and industry. There is serious work happening in some shadow teams (though there is also a lack of capacity and a nervousness about making clear commitments). The party is clear in its opposition to expanding North Sea oil and gas.  

There is also a recognition by most, though not all, shadow ministers of the vital importance of preventing climate breakdown and nature loss for the good of the country: Labour shows no signs of flirting with the populist, climate sceptic narrative that we cannot afford net zero, and that it is all cost and no opportunity.  

But the dropping of the £28 billion pledge prompts hard questions. It would be good to get some answers.