Never mind net zero – let’s spend the money on the NHS instead. That, in an echo of the infamous promise on the side of the Vote Leave battle bus, is what Reform chairman Richard Tice announced this morning at the party’s latest press conference. Achieving net zero, he said, would cost £30 billion a year. Drop that and the party would be able to spend more money on the NHS.
Reform’s plans, he said, would involve spending an extra £5 billion a year on extra NHS staff, £7 billion a year on commissioning independent treatment for NHS patients and £3 billion on tax relief for people using private healthcare. With a contingency, he said, that would come to £17 billion a year.
The present government has not budgeted for £30 billion a year towards net zero
Given that £17 billion is a lot less than £30 billion it sounds like a good deal. ‘We have a choice in this country, it seems to me,’ added Tice. ‘A pretty clear choice. Do we want zero waiting lists in two years and to keep them there, that is the Reform choice. Or do we want net zero CO2 emissions in 25 years? That is the Labour choice.’
But there is a slight problem here. It may well cost £30 billion a year to reach net zero. No one really has any idea of what the eventual cost would be, but if anything Reform’s estimate seems a little on the mild side. Four years ago National Grid ESO estimated that it would cost between £2.8 and £3 trillion to decarbonise Britain’s energy system alone. That would work out at £100 billion a year over the next 30 years – and doesn’t include the cost of decarbonising industries such as steel, cement, agriculture etc.
However, the present government has not budgeted for £30 billion a year towards net zero. It may be very amiss of Rishi Sunak to insist that he can achieve net zero by 2050 without a very large budget allocated for it, but what it means for Reform’s costings is that there is no provision for £30 billion of spending which can simply be plucked out of current government spending plans and transferred to the NHS instead. If an – unlikely – Reform UK government wanted to spend an extra £17 billion on the NHS it would have to find the money instead from tax rises, borrowing or cuts to current spending budgets.
There are some current green subsidies which the government could chop. At present, for example, energy consumers are being charged an average of £188 per household on social and environmental schemes (these are not all green levies because the sum also includes spending on fuel subsidies for the poor). A Reform government could, theoretically, do away with these and convert it into an NHS levy instead, yielding a total of around £5 billion a year. But I say theoretically, because a lot of that £188 is tied up in long-term subsidy contracts which could not be terminated without compensation to wind farm owners and the like. There are also some energy subsidies which are funded directly from central government – but again many of these involve long-term contracts which cannot simply be terminated.
There is another observation to be made about Reform UK’s net zero plans. Back in April, Tice reiterated Reform UK’s support for a referendum on net zero. That now seems to have been dropped – a Reform UK government would simply abandon net zero without specifically asking the people. Given that the party has included ending net zero in its manifesto (sorry, ‘contract’) there would be no great need for a referendum. But the change does perhaps speak of a lack of confidence that such a referendum would be won.
That is not without reason. An Ipsos poll in 2022, for example, found that 52 per cent of the public agreed with the 2050 net zero target and only 11 per cent were against the whole idea of a target. While public support does tend to drop when people are asked about specific policies on net zero, it would still require a sharp change in public opinion for Reform to win a yes/no referendum on net zero. That may of course change as the date approaches and the costs become clearer, but for the moment Reform is wise to drop the idea of a referendum.
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