Victoria Stratford is a final year student at the University of Essex, due to graduate in 2025.
Starmer’s pledge of £22 billion to carbon capture and regeneration over the next 25 years has the potential to create thousands of jobs, attract private investment. The two planned plants at Merseyside and Teesside will also, according to ministers, help the UK meet its climate targets.
Carbon capture, utilisation, and storage captures the emissions from burning fuels for energy or from industrial processes and uses or transports them for storage permanently underground. Ed Miliband first announced these plans under the last Labour government in 2009, but little progress has been made since then.
This has obvious potential to mitigate this country’s environmental footprint, if it can be done economically. The Prime Minister has also described this project as an effort to regenerate the “industrial heartland” of the north, one which would generate more jobs for the local communities.
Again, that could be true – if the project is a success. Starmer’s plan aims to keep “bills down for good” by improving the UK’s energy security and “relight the fires of renewal” in the areas hit hard by deindustrialisation. The Prime Minister has said carbon capture is a “race that we can win” thanks to the UK’s geology, heritage and experience in green finance.
But as the clocks ticks down towards what may prove to be the make-or-break budget of this government, the proposal raises an obvious question. At a time when budgets are squeezed, and the Chancellor is having to force her departmental colleagues to make unpopular cuts, where is the money for the initial investment coming from?
After all, when Labour took office in July, Reeves claimed that his government inherited a £22 billion black hole in the budget. That’s why the Winter Fuel Allowance had to go, and the two-child welfare limit had to stay. Yet the cost of this CCS project is… £22bn.
The importance of reducing the affects of climate change cannot be understated. However, the hard-working people of Great Britain will be the people most affected by the creation of the two plants at Merseyside and Teesside, as it is likely that the funding for this project will come from tax rises that have been announced by the chancellor (“billions in tax rises are expected to hit both individuals and businesses”).
Ministers have repeatedly emphasised the alleged ‘black hole’ in the public finances; to cover the shortfall, Labour have planned to cut the winter fuel payments for those not receiving pension credit and cancelling infrastructure projects including the road tunnel near Stonehenge.
Yet now the Government has managed to find the funds for a very expensive carbon capture and regeneration project; cutting support for pensioners inevitably now looks much more like a choice than a necessity.
And how will the rest of the Cabinet feel about being forced to do the unpleasant work of finding savings on the basis of a gap in the public finances almost exactly the same size as the bung one of their colleagues is receiving for a pet project?
