A senior Labour frontbencher has all but confirmed the party has ditched its commitment to spend £28bn a year on green investment, prompting warnings that the UK risks falling behind other nations in initiatives to tackle the climate crisis.
Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said Labour would decide how much to spend on environmental programmes once it got into government, depending on the individual schemes and the state of the economy.
Jones told Sky News: “The number that we will get to, if we are in government, will be subject to two things.
“Firstly, it will be subject to the state of the economy. We know we’re going to inherit a bad economy from the Conservatives, but we have plans to turn that around, and of course, we hope to be successful doing that. But it will also be subject to case-by-case business cases that, if I’m the chief secretary to the Treasury in the next Labour government, I will have to sign off.”
While one Labour official argued this was not a definitive ditching of the commitment, first set out in 2021, the comments mark the first time a shadow minister has publicly acknowledged the party is no longer targeting £28bn.
The Guardian revealed on Thursday that the party leader, Keir Starmer, had decided to drop the commitment, which had become a totem of the party’s green ambitions but also a subject of repeated attack from the Conservatives.
Jones said the amount spent “will depend on what the types of projects are, what the types of partnerships are with the private sector, and also our ability for the market, for our country, to deliver on those projects”.
“The number will move around just as a matter of fact,” he said. “It will depend on the strength of the economy – we will only invest when it’s affordable – but also on a case-by-case basis working with the private sector.”
Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, also later talked down the centrality of the £28bn target. Speaking during a visit in East Lothian with the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, she said: “It’s not about just throwing a figure out there willy-nilly, and saying we’ll just put that in. It’s got to be part of applying to our fiscal rules.”
While insisting that Labour “want to ramp up to £28bn”, Rayner said that the party would not be hemmed in by “arbitrary” numbers. “We don’t even know what the public finances are going to be like,” she said. “We’re not just going to throw money out there.”
Party officials have been discussing for weeks what to do about the £28bn commitment, which has been steadily scaled back since the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, unveiled it.
Last year, Reeves said the target would be hit only in the second half of the parliament, and then only if the party could fulfil its economic promise to have debt falling as a share of economic output by the end of a five-year period.
However, Andrew Simms, the director of the New Weather Institute thinktank, said a lack of ambition over such investment risked a UK “trapped with polluting, expensive, unhealthy and increasingly inefficient infrastructure, in everything from housing to transport and energy systems”.
He said: “It means Britain will fall behind other nations and be more vulnerable to extreme weather events, energy price volatility and the health threats of global heating.
“Worst of all, it will be a false economy, because the costs of not investing are catastrophically higher than climate-proofing the economy in a way that also pays for itself by lowering bills, creating jobs, raising air quality and improving environmental wellbeing.”
Rebecca Newsom, head of politics at Greenpeace UK, said the demise of the £28bn figure meant “Labour will fail to clarify for voters what they really stand for”.
She said: “They risk leaving the door wide open for the EU, US and China to overtake us in the global green tech race. And they will provide few assurances about how high bills, freezing cold homes, toxic air pollution, and unreliable public transport aren’t just here to stay.”
In recent weeks Starmer has continued to stick by the £28bn target, even while downgrading it from a “pledge” to an “ambition”.
