Ross Clark

Setting ourselves stringent net zero targets will help us get ahead of other countries in the race to develop green technologies of the future. We know this must be true because Ed Miliband, and many others, keep telling us so. It is just that things don’t seem to be working out quite this way in the real world. The collapse this week of the Swedish electric vehicle (EV) battery-maker Northvolt has once again shown how the countries most committed to net zero seem to be the ones which keep missing out on the spoils – while their industries drain away abroad, quite often to China. Was there any company which symbolised Europe’s green industrial future more than Northvolt?

So it is goodbye to the Payment Systems Regulator, which will be merged with the Financial Conduct Authority. That is not a huge breakthrough for the nation in itself – it merely means that the likes of Visa and Mastercard will have a different telephone number to ring when they want to organise a bit of lobbying. But it is, Keir Starmer wants us to know, just the beginning. Just as he promised on Monday to chop the benefits bill, the Prime Minister wants us to know that he now has quangos in his sights. To be fair to him, he does seem to appreciate the problem with ‘quasi-autonomous non-government organisations’, to give them their full name.

How difficult life has become for earnest, liberal-minded motorists who like to show off their environmental credentials through their choice of car. Until recently, they were buying Teslas by the car park-load. But now they seem suddenly to have gone off them. European Tesla sales have plummeted since Donald Trump’s election victory brought Elon Musk into government as axeman-in-chief. Nowhere has the plunge been more precipitous than in Germany, where sales fell 60 per cent in January and a further 76 per cent in February – when just 1,429 Teslas were sold. Existing Tesla owners, too, appear to be dumping their vehicles prematurely.

The need for the civil service reforms which Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden is proposing is glaring. It can be summed up in the evidence that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey presented to the Commons Treasury Committee last week: that since the pandemic, productivity in the public sector has shrunk by 7 to 8 per cent. We have a civil service which has become swollen in recent years, but without any corresponding increase in output. Over the past 15 years civil service numbers have performed a bungee jump. David Cameron’s coalition made a good start, thinning out numbers by around a fifth. Come the Brexit process, however, and numbers began to rebound. When Covid arrived in 2020 the growth in civil servants accelerated.

Will this finally be the government which gets on top of the voracious financial monster that is the NHS and tackles its chronic over-spending? No, I can’t quite see that, either. But it has to be said that the new interim Chief Executive of NHS England – Sir Jim Mackey, who has replaced Amanda Pritchard – has made a good start. Rather than just beg the government for more money he has turned on the leaders of NHS trusts, who have been told to go back and revise the spending plans which they recently submitted. Well he might. Even with an extra NHS England granted an extra £25.7 billion over two years in the autumn budget, it seems that NHS trusts have still found ways of over-spending. The combined spending plans of NHS trusts, it turns out, exceed the money available by £6.

Did anyone really expect Huw Edwards to return the £200,000 he ‘earned’ – or, more correctly, was paid – between his arrest in November 2023 and when he finally resigned from the BBC the following April? The BBC’s chairman, Samir Shah, appeared to think so when he faced the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport on Tuesday. ‘We’ve obviously asked, and we’ve said it many times, but he seems unwilling. There was a moment that we thought he might just do the right thing for a change, then he decided not to.’ If it was Mr Shah himself doing the asking, he was no doubt impeccably polite.

Energy bills may be going up and the economy may be flatlining, but not for long. Thankfully, the government’s Climate Change Committee has the answer. In a press release introducing the committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget, published this morning, interim chair Piers Forster declares: ‘The committee is delighted to be able to present a good news story about how the country can decarbonise while also creating savings across the country.’ By 2040, when the CCC sees the UK’s carbon emissions falling by 87 per cent on their 1990 level, the cost of heating and lighting our homes is going to fall by £716 a year and the cost of running a car by £699. Surely never has such a Panglossian document been put before the public by an arm of government.

If you live opposite the vacant site in Northumberland that was supposed to become the Britishvolt ‘gigafactory’ pumping out batteries for the electric car industry, or near the Vestas wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight where half the 600 workers have been told they face redundancy, you might just struggle to believe that Britain is in the midst of a net zero jobs boom. Yet that is the striking claim that is being made by CBI Economics and the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU). The net zero sector, it says, grew by 10.1 per cent last year, added £83.1 billion in gross value added (GVA) and accounted for 951,000 full-time jobs – an additional 125,700 created in the past three years. This is, needless to say, what Ed Miliband wants us to believe.