Simon French

This Budget is the start of a new energy pathway that the 10 Year Plan will build on. The priority is to bring energy costs down to help British business to compete, and British households to cope. And cheaper electricity will boost electrification, increasing our energy security and helping to decarbonise the whole economy. What does this mean? First, it means a focus on levies and policy costs on bills. The Conservatives added £100 to everyone's bill via levies in their last decade in power. Labour has cut £150 from bill costs already. But today, John Healey has drawn a line in the sand, with the announcement that we will add no new costs to energy bills, with a comprehensive cost control framework to follow at the spending review. The Chancellor is also junking plans, first set out by the Tories, to add on up to around £10 a year on bills to pay for hydrogen projects. Second, it means taking account of the interaction between the pace of grid build-out and the pace at which renewables are added to the grid. The NAO have said that investment in expanding the transmission network declined in real terms between 2016 and 2020, just when it was clear that more intermittent power meant we would need more capacity. It is now forecast to rise to over £10bn a year. But with growing constraint and distribution costs, it's right that the system costs of all new power are considered. That is why we will only procure clean power through AR8 (the next auction round) if we are confident it will lower bills. And we will reform the contract for difference by AR9 to support building the lowest cost system, fixing market distortions and siting assets in the right place. The evidence is clear, clean power is an essential part of the route to cheap power, and the overall approach of seeking to get ourselves off the gas-price rollercoaster to the right one. Gas is setting the electricity price less and less every year. If it wasn't for adding renewables to the grid in recent years then the current Iran price shock would have been worse for families and businesses. The Conservatives and Reform's ideological anti-renewables approach is the wrong one and fails in the face of evidence on how to protect bill payers from shocks and the need to make ourselves less reliant on foreign dictators. We'll take a pragmatic approach to get bills down. Getting electricity prices down, ensuring new clean power does not run ahead of the grid, is also the credible route to reaching our net zero goals. The decarbonisation that we want to enable in our homes, on our roads and in our businesses, is six times larger than that still to be achieved from getting to a clean grid. Unless we make electricity cheaper relative to other energy sources, we will struggle to increase adoption of EV and heat pumps.

John Healey got his can and gave it an almighty kick down the road thetimes.com/article/27e6b41…

Housebuilders agree with the OBR....

Badenoch channelling @Frencheconomics on the rationing of labour, capital and energy

Big downgrade in GDP growth forecast for next year from OBR 2026: 1.2% (was 1.1 in spring forecast) 2027: 1% (1.6) 2028: 1.6% (1.6) 2029: 1.8% (1.5) 2030: 1.7% (1.5) 2031: 1.6%

On balance I come down on the same side of the line as Simon, but maybe for a slightly different reason. I don't think it is practical to deliver the sort of radical changes needed at this budget both for external reasons (current external shock on headroom) & internal reasons (this government simply hasn't had time to develop sufficiently credible & detailed policies, rushing would do more harm than good on balance). I think the real test comes in following months on: 10 year strategy, welfare reform, spending review. These three together do need to signify a more radical approach to solving the major structural challenges facing the UK economy.