‘We cannot allow debt to keep rising’, the Chancellor said to Parliament last week, repeatedly emphasising the need to ‘level’ with the public about the size of the national debt. Strange then that just days later it was revealed that ministers have been doing the opposite when it comes to the costs of the fashionable cause of ‘Net Zero’. Instead government officials deliberately hid ‘more realistic’ estimates which showed Net Zero would cost billions more than publicised, while agreeing amongst themselves that the predicted costs were ‘highly uncertain’.
These revelations came about after the Treasury was finally defeated in a two-year battle to prevent me seeing documents I’d requested under the Freedom of Information Act. I’d asked for the calculations behind their claim that the cost of decarbonising the UK economy was going to be around £1 trillion.
In the event, after two years, they eventually handed over what was essentially a short memo, discussing two competing estimates of the cost, one from the Department for Business Enterprise and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the other from the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).
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