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 7^th 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.