A new report from the Public Accounts Committee warns the government has no idea what the cost of implementing Net Zero will be. The committee, designed to scrutinise spending on taxpayer-funded projects, slams the government’s latest plan for lacking any answers to key questions of how it will fund the transition, how it will deliver the policy, how it will replace tax revenue from fuel duty and “even a general direction of travel on levies and taxation”. The report goes on the say ministers have:

“no reliable estimate of what the process of implementing the net zero policy is actually likely to cost British consumers, households, businesses and government itself.”

Don’t know, or don’t want to say…

While BEIS claims it’ll be too difficult to separate Net Zero spending from other costs, the committee points out the government overcame the exact same challenge when creating its Covid Cost Tracker. In addition, some of the Net Zero measures are slammed as having vague targets, worded as “as many as possible” or “as many… as reasonably practicable”. So to sum up, the government’s embarking on the most expensive policy in recent decades without any idea how much it’ll cost the taxpayer, how much it’ll cost ordinary people, how to achieve the policy, what the policy aims to achieve and how to measure the policy achievements…