Labour downplays commitment to flagship £28bn green pledge

SIR KEIR STARMER has appeared to downplay the significance of his flagship £28billion green investment pledge, as he said that “the mission isn’t writing a cheque, the mission is green power by 2030”.

Labour had proposed spending the amount annually from year one of being in power, but that has been watered down to a pledge to get to the figure in the second half of a first term.

Sir Keir cast further doubt on the pledge last week as he said the money would come from borrowing, adding that if public finances were not sufficiently healthy “we will borrow less”.

When asked about the £28billion pledge during an interview on

yesterday, Sir Keir said: “The mission isn’t writing a cheque, the mission is green power by 2030. We are not rowing back on that. That is the absolute mission, the ambition that we are going to do that.”

When challenged that he had pledged to spend £28billion a year, Sir Keir said he was “not going to shy away from the fact that you have got to

‘Investment in clean power is important, but there are many other things that need to be done’

invest for the future and you can borrow to invest”.

But he added: “If we are going to get to clean power by 2030 and we have been in pretty intense discussions with the partners that will deliver it, they say to me, ‘yes, we do need investment, but what we need more than investment is we need to change the planning rules because we can’t move fast enough.

“We need to make sure the National Grid is quicker because it is much too slow, we need an industrial strategy and we need a skills strategy’.

“So yes, that investment is important to get to clean power, but there are many other things that need to be done and can be done very quickly by an incoming Labour government.”

When announcing the green pledge in 2021, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, promised that as “Britain’s first green chancellor” she would use the money to invest in green jobs, factories to build electric vehicle batteries and planting trees.

The announcement came as part of the party’s Green Prosperity Plan, which also promised the creation of a publicly-owned clean energy company, GB Energy.