The Tories piled fresh pressure on Labour tonight after a shadow minister was revealed to have admitted their green plans will cost ‘hundreds of billions’ of pounds.
Sir Keir Starmer was urged to come clean on possible tax rises following the publication of leaked comments made by a member of his top team.
In a recording obtained by the Telegraph, Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, described Labour’s original £28billion a year green plan as ‘tiny’.
He added the fact that Sir Keir had dramatically scaled back the Green Prosperity Plan from £28billion to £4.7billion a year – excluding existing green schemes – ‘made it sound as if we basically junked the whole thing but we definitely haven’t’.
When he was asked whether £28billion a year was not enough to decarbonise the economy, Mr Jones replied: ‘No, it’s tiny. Hundreds of billions of pounds we need.’
Laura Trott, the Tory Treasury minister, this evening called on Sir Keir to ‘be straight with people and urgently explain what taxes will be put up to pay for it’.
Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, described Labour’s original £28billion a year green plan as ‘tiny’ in a leaked recording
At the heart of Labour’s green plans is a pledge to debarbonise the UK’s power grid by 2030
Mr Jones’ comments were reportedly made at a public meeting in Bristol in March, the month after Labour scaled back their initial £28billion green investment plan.
At the heart of Labour’s green plans is a pledge to debarbonise the UK’s power grid by 2030.
Mr Jones told the meeting that the £28 billion figure ‘became a distraction against the mission of decarbonising the power system by 2030’ and that ‘it wasn’t really defined well enough in the first place, so we probably shouldn’t have announced it in the way we did’.
Mr Jones told an audience member who spoke to him at the end of the meeting that decarbonising the power system ‘is still one of the top five priorities and it is going to be a huge amount of effort to get there because we’ll have to move quite quickly’.
‘But a lot of the coverage in the news was about that specific 28 [billion pounds], which because journalists saw conflict made it sound as if we basically junked the whole thing but we definitely haven’t,’ he added.
When an audience member said some people would say that £28billion a year was not enough to decarbonise the economy, Mr Jones replied: ‘No, it’s tiny. Hundreds of billions of pounds we need.’
Ms Trott said: ‘This is very serious. Rather than costing £5billion a year, the man Keir Starmer would put in charge of the country’s money is saying Labour’s flagship policy would mean spending ‘hundreds of billions of pounds’ more than Labour are telling people in public.
‘This is about trust – tonight Keir Starmer must be straight with people and urgently explain what taxes will Labour put up to pay for it.’
A Labour spokesman said: ‘Labour’s mission is to achieve clean energy by 2030 and our plan is fully funded and fully costed.
‘The policies in the green prosperity plan represent £23.7 billion of investment over the course of the next parliament.
‘A large part of this will be funded by a proper windfall tax on oil and gas giants which continue to earn record profits.
‘The remaining investment will be part-funded through borrowing to invest, within our fiscal rules.
‘By providing stability and initial public investment, our plan will crowd in billions in private capital over the longer-term.
‘Our plan will help unlock the economic growth that the clean energy transition can bring, and cut energy bills for good.
‘We will capitalise the new Great British Energy with £8.3billion, over the next parliament, and create thousands of good jobs and build up supply chains in every corner of the UK.’