Tory Net Zero Costing Overstates the Bill by £479bn
Kemi Badenoch’s hundred-page conference document says the Climate Change Committee put the cost of reaching net zero at £957bn. The committee’s own figures total £478bn — half that. The apparent cause is a spreadsheet tally that counted the row of column totals as well as the costs. The Conservatives had not responded.
The committee’s response, on the record, is drier than the error deserves: “We don’t recognise this number. The committee has previously offered to meet with Ms Badenoch and talk her through our advice. That offer is, of course, still open.” Its most recent estimate of the net cost is about £110bn, or roughly £4bn a year, which is 0.2% of GDP — a different order of magnitude from the figure in the document. The mistake was spotted by the research outfit Carbon Brief, and the number appears to have travelled into the document from a think tank report and a magazine article rather than from the committee itself. The reason this is more than a clerical matter is that the figure is doing work: it is the headline cost used to justify scrapping the 2050 target, and it is wrong by a factor of two. There is also an unfortunate symmetry with the document’s own framing. Mrs Badenoch’s foreword notes that “as an engineer” she is used to correctly diagnosing problems, and the text argues that “to fix a problem we must first have an accurate understanding of what is causing it”. This rests on one outlet’s reporting, but the committee’s quotation is on the record and the arithmetic is checkable against its published budget.