Rishi Sunak’s spending review has left me unimpressed

It’s barely a week since the prime minister sent out a press release detailing his 10-point climate action plan.

Somehow it seems not to have been delivered next door as the chancellor virtually ignored it in this week’s spending review.

Let’s be fair. The prime minister’s plan was more a shopping list than a serious attempt to address the climate emergency, so maybe Rishi Sunak didn’t bother to read it. 

But if it was intended to make the UK ‘the cleanest, greenest on Earth’ as Boris Johnson promised on the night of his election victory, I would have expected the chancellor to take some of the steps needed to deliver on that promise.

Instead, the climate crisis was barely mentioned in his statement to the Commons, and we heard more about by-passes than nature.

At the very moment when we need co-ordination, leadership and joined-up thinking over action on the climate and ecological emergency, we’re seeing the opposite.

Our country faces a huge economic crisis, the worst for 300 years. But moments of economic crisis are a time to be ambitious and think big, not penny-pinch and leave the poorest to pick up the tab for restarting the economy.

The pay freeze inflicted on many key workers, among them care staff who have often been on the frontline during the Covid-19 crisis, is mean-spirited.

The warm applause that ministers were so keen to join in during the spring has turned into a cold shoulder this winter. The prime minister has said there would be no return to austerity – for many, this will feel like it.

It’s also downright cruel in pushing some of the bill onto the backs of the world’s poorest by cutting the UK’s aid budget – thereby breaking a Tory manifesto commitment. 

That is not a great start to the ‘global Britain’ the prime minister keeps bleating about. The rest of the world now knows that when the going gets tough, the UK reneges on international commitments.

Investing in green infrastructure needs to go hand-in-hand with stopping bailouts to polluters and pouring millions into fossil fuels overseas

We’ve known in the UK that this prime minister often doesn’t keep his word. Now other countries are learning that, too. What international reputation we had is rapidly being shredded. 

In his statement, the chancellor said he wanted to prioritise jobs. When unemployment is expected to rise to 2.6million by mid-2021, that is clearly right. But what’s needed is a green jobs guarantee that will not only tackle current joblessness, but also put us on track to meet climate targets.

By investing in the essential transition to a carbon-free economy, he could have created far more jobs, with a better short-term return on investment and higher long-term savings. That is the way to build back better.

Rishi Sunak has said himself that future prosperity depends on a healthy planet, so why does he ignore it?

A national infrastructure bank is welcome, particularly if its remit will be to help deliver the commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and provide funding for projects across the UK. We had one before, of course, until the Tories flogged it off three years ago in a typically short-sighted move. 

But investing in green infrastructure needs to go hand-in-hand with stopping bailouts to polluters and pouring millions into fossil fuels overseas.

There is a more fundamental issue that needs to be addressed if we want to leave a healthy planet to future generations, and that is our outdated economic model, which prioritises GDP growth above people’s health and wellbeing, and is pushing out planet beyond its limits.

The destruction of the natural world is also making future pandemics much more likely. The WWF says that ‘every hectare’ of the Amazon rainforest removed ‘risks a new pandemic’ by forcing wildlife and humans together, which increases our risk of infection.

A focus on short-term profit and growth above long-term health and wellbeing is the root cause of many of our country’s current problems. 

That needs to be acknowledged and dealt with. As a start, the Treasury’s ‘green book’, which is used to appraise policies and spending plans, needs to be replaced with a net zero test, so that all spending and fiscal measures are measured against our climate and nature goals. 

Covid-19 has changed us as a country, and there is significant public support for a greener, fairer and kinder economy – one that values the health and wellbeing of people and nature above the focus on GDP.

We could build a society where we live within our environmental limits, create rewarding jobs across the country, and build back better and greener.

At the start of his statement, the chancellor said the economic emergency had only just begun. The climate and nature emergencies have been with us for some time.

We’re still waiting for the Government to take serious action to deal with them. 

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.

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