Last week, I came across a government database that I had not heard of before, namely the Subsidy Control Transparency Database. The database was mentioned in an update email from DESNZ, telling me that the results of the Contracts for Difference Allocation Round 6 (AR6) had been loaded on to it. Of course, my curiosity got the better of me and I had to dig in to see what other Net Zero and energy related subsidies might be lurking within.
In the film Whisky Galore, the SS Cabinet Minister runs aground and its cargo of whisky is harvested by the locals. Our cabinet ministers have yet to run aground, but there are plenty of people eager to harvest the subsidies on offer. Over the past two years, I have come across some egregious things in Net Zero world, but even I was shocked by some of the scale of some of the subsidy schemes that have been implemented.
Subsidy Control Transparency Database
Before we dig into the Net Zero and energy related items, we should note some important caveats about the whole database. First, for subsidies recorded as part of the Contract for Difference Scheme (CfD), the government claims the amounts are a “higher end estimate”. Second, it appears as though there are some duplicate entries, for instance SC10301 and SC10069 are both support measures for the development of film audiences, in the sum of £60 million with identical start dates. Finally, the budget amounts might be suspect because the most expensive subsidy line is SC1005, U.K. Film Tax Relief Prolongation which is supposed to cost £2,960 billion, that’s more than U.K. GDP, between April 2020 and April 2025. It is very unlikely that this figure is accurate and so it calls into question the accuracy of other entries in the database.
Of the 1,169 schemes in the database, 1,025 of them have active status. Of these, I judged 144 of them to be Net Zero or energy-related. The total budget for these items is £328 billion – yes, billion, with a ‘b’.
However, there are two items related to the Renewables Obligation Scheme, items SC11007 and SC10753, that have budget values of £1 and £0 respectively. This suggests the budget is understated by a considerable margin, as the OBR forecasts that the RO scheme will cost well over £7 biilion per year for the next few years. The RO scheme has been running for quite some time, so the cumulative subsidies by the end of the scheme must be measured in the high tens of billions, possibly over £100 billion.
There are so many schemes that it is difficult to cover them all here, so we will focus on the largest items and highlight some of the most grotesque absurdities.
Electricity Generation Subsidies
The largest cluster of subsidies is for generating electricity. This includes Contracts for Difference (CfDs), Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs) and ROs. The budget value for CfDs allocated in Allocation Round 6 (AR6), item SC11117, will cost £45 billion over its lifetime. CfDs from AR5 will cost £5 billion, AR4 will cost £15 billion and CfDs from earlier rounds another £15 billion. Some individual offshore wind farms are listed, such as Hornsea (£3.4 billion), Walney (£2.1 billion) and Beatrice (£1.9 billion). Wind energy on remote islands is scheduled to receive £15 billion of subsidies between October 2017 and March 2025. FiTs are calculated to cost £31 billion (item SC10220).
Subsidies to Mitigate Intermittent Renewables
As well as being expensive, wind and solar renewables are, of course, intermittent, so we need to pay for backup when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing – or blowing too hard. The Government has created the Capacity Market to provide the backup, but it too will require a subsidy estimated at £16.1 billion up to mid-December 2024. They obviously need to update this figure, as the OBR forecasts that the annual cost of the Capacity Market will rise from approximately £1 billion in 2023–24 to £4 billion by 2027–28. The total forecast from 2023–24 to 2029–30 is over £19 billion.
There’s even a £14 million subsidy scheme (SC10810) to “support innovative technologies with potential to mitigate impacts of offshore wind farms on U.K. Air Defence”.
Subsidies for Using Expensive Electricity
The largest single energy-related item with the highest value is the British Industry Supercharger Package for energy-intensive industries (EIIs) (Item SC11062), with a value of £51 billion. This is designed to provide “electricity price support” to around 370 energy-intensive businesses in sectors such as steel, paper and batteries. There is another £936 million for the Energy Bills Discount Scheme, again targeted at EIIs.
We have a total of £87.4 billion in subsidies for CfDs, another £31 billion for Feed-in Tariffs, £15 billion for remote island wind plus a very large but unknown amount of subsidies for Renewables Obligations, which are, of course, making our electricity very expensive. On top of that, there is well over £16 billion for the capacity market. To compensate for that, we are going to spend £52 billion supporting energy-intensive industries. It is simply an absurd government merry-go-round of subsidy upon subsidy in a vain attempt to mitigate our insane energy policy.
We pay for more than 4,500 people in DESNZ, at a cost of over £400 million per year, many of them to devise these parasitic schemes that are destroying the economy.
Subsidies for Biofuels
In addition to the subsidies for electricity generation, there is an insane total of £45 billion allocated to various Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) schemes (Items SC10126, SC10120 and SC10119), which essentially incentivise farmers to burn wood to heat empty sheds out to 2040.
There is also another £2 billion for green gas and a further £1.1 billion for the Teesside CHP biomass plant.
Subsidies to Make Electricity Generation Less Efficient
But the madness does not stop there, because another £30 billion of subsidy has been allocated to the Dispatchable Power Agreement Business Model (Item SC11175), designed to support gas-fired power stations by incentivising the installation of carbon capture and storage (CCUS) equipment. There is another £13 billion to be spent on other CCUS-related subsidies and £2.5 billion more for various hydrogen subsidy schemes.
Subsidies to Transform Society
A total of £1.28 billion has been allocated to transforming the automotive industry to deliver an electrified supply chain and a further £289 million for the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund (IETF).
Several other items relate to decarbonising heat in social housing, worth a total of £2.1 billion and a further £450 million for boiler upgrade schemes. These schemes are designed to implement the same types of measures that the Government DEEP report calculated would have payback times measured in centuries or millennia.
On top of all that, there is another £567 million subsidy for various ultra-low emissions bus projects.
Subsides for Reliable Energy
In contrast to the hundreds of billions to be spent subsidising low-density, intermittent power sources like wind and solar, £409 million (with an ‘m’) will be spent on various nuclear research and development projects. They have also calculated that the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant will only cost £130 million, which is an anomalously low figure, since they are projecting spending of almost £8 billion on Sizewell C. Even that figure pales into insignificance compared to the various forms of renewable subsidies.
Conclusions
We must exercise some caution when drawing conclusions because of the obvious howlers in the data. Of course, we are not going to spend £2,960 billion on tax relief for the film industry. However, when it comes to the energy-related items, it does appear as though the mistakes tend to underestimate the cost of subsidies. The RO scheme will obviously cost much more than £1, and the Capacity Market will cost more than £16 billion.
We see a truly surreal arrangement of subsidy schemes, ploughing hundreds of billions into renewables, alongside additional tens of billions in subsidies to industry to mitigate the impact of the resulting high energy prices. It is completely insane. All this renewable energy largesse contrasts markedly with just £24.6 million allocated to the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust, mostly capital funding for housing.
Imagine what society would look like if we stopped subsidising incompetent and expensive forms of energy and their parasitic cheerleaders. Bills would be lower, taxes could be lower and more companies would have the confidence to invest in Britain and create jobs. Expensive energy and the accompanying subsidies are killing the economy. We must ditch the Net Zero madness now.
David Turver writes the Eigen Values Substack, where this article first appeared.
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Same Home Office twerps that put any number of hoops and hurdles in the way of temporary visas for young sports men and women of the wrong ethnicity wishing to enter this country temporarily to play sport, while coughing up billions of taxpayers’ money to put up jobless illegal immigrants of the right ethnicity in hotels.
https://www.ecb.co.uk/about/policies/regulations/overseas
Sort of state-sponsored Far Left duplicity and truth-twisting you come to expect from the Twerps Office.
Twerps is a bit mild is it not?
Personally I prefer the Deringer to the Beretta or the Smith and Wesson.
We need to bring back public flogging… as a first step.
For civil service incompetence
“Twerp and twerps” such wonderful words!
I just think it’s funny. Bring it on.
It’s all grist to the mill of persuading normies how completely dysfunctional the government and the civil service are.
Totally unfit for service.
Where is the English Milei?
It is not Farage nor Tice.
Where is the English Wilders or Le Pen?
It is not Farage nor Tice.
Where is the English Trump?
It is not Farage nor Tice.
Hell, where is the English Meloni?
Nowhere.
We are on our own.
The closest to Milei might be Thatcher, the closest to Wilders or Le Pen possibly Enoch Powell. Hard to have a Trump as we don’t have a Presidential system, though there are some vague similarities with Farage but Trump is much more disagreeable than Farage and his voter base is fine with that – in fact that’s often why they favour him. I suppose Badenoch is a polite version of Meloni. In general they are all too afraid of being called “far right”.
Rupert Lowe gets my vote, figuratively speaking. He’s much more forthright than Farage and bangs on about “mass deportations” and what should be done with illegals and foreign criminals all the time. You’d be hard pushed to ever hear Farage utter that term.
Thanks for that. I know nothing about him other than the name. I will keep a lookout for him.
He’s a Reform MP who asks very pertinent questions in parliament.
Hear, hear.
Rupert Lowe is a fine speaker, very focused on the issues and solutions that need to be implemented. Ben Habib likewise. Zia is also sharp. Lee Anderson gives a refreshing dose of humour and down to earth.
future is looking bright.
A successful businessman I understand. Hopefully gives him an understanding of how the world works.
In what ways is Trump much more disagreeable than Farage?
I meant disagreeable in the sense that he is not afraid of upsetting people when required – more straight talking. For me, it’s a positive quality for a political leader.
They can say stupid things at times on an equal measure. Trump with Operation Warp Speed being a great thing, and Farage with….Make the Blair a vaccine Tsar.
I think you’re probably right.
However the English 2 party system does work, just not like other systems.
The way it’s supposed work is that the tory party will be forced to the fight by the success of reform and general disgust with 2tk and his lot.
They will ditch kemi and choose somebody more energetically right wing, who that might be God only knows.
A bit like we’re seeing in Germany where despite the cordon sanitaire stitch up, afd is dictanfluencing the direction of travel on some key issues.
You would think that, but since Cameron flooded the Nonconservative party with Liberal Democrats in 2009/10, the existing members of the left wing factions – the one nationers, the TRG etc have been fortified, removing any residual power from the Monday Club, the Euro sceptics and so on. Look at some of the thoughts of Badenoch now finding their way out. She is not of the right.
Yes you are right, however, they still have to avoid being outflanked on the right and with a surging reform party and an overton window well and truly shifted rightwards, the electoral arithmetic will be compelling.
The one thing they care about is being elected.
Unfortunately they value this over keeping election promises.
We can but hope.
Sunak seemed intent on losing, but I suppose he had ticked the “British PM” box which left him set up for life.
True…I have seen the video of her pushing “diversity”….enough said!
The guy Kemi run against was making all the right noises regarding immigration and Western culture being superior, but they chose Kemi. Maybe they need to think again. That said, both parties are captured by the Globalists like in that hollowed out ski resort.
Where is Meloni? Bought and paid for by the EU.
Some things never change, and certain corrupt organizations never will, as Connor Tomlinson wrote about RICU last November. I wouldn’t deign to give this absurdity a second thought;
”The body responsible is called RICU — the Home Office’s Research, Information, and Communications Unit. Some learned about it during the COVID pandemic, thanks to Laura Dodsworth’s A State Of Fear. Others may have heard of it in a report by GB News this month, which revealed that civil servants produced a report calling the grooming gang scandal, in which thousands of girls across England were sexually exploited by predominantly-Pakistani Muslim perpetrators, a “grievance narrative” fabricated by “right-wing extremists”. The report warned “right-wing extremist narratives (particularly around immigration and policing) are in some cases ‘leaking’ into mainstream debates”. It classified “Cultural Nationalism” as “extreme right-wing”: with the “main belief” being “’Western culture is under threat from mass migration’”. Another example: “Claims of ‘two-tier’ policing, where two groups are allegedly treated differently after similar behaviour”. As I mentioned in a previous essay, there are ample double-standards to point to in Britain’s justice system, regarding those imprisoned for civil unrest following the Southport murders this summer. The Labour government have denounced and distanced themselves from the paper.
RICU has also received notoriety in recent years as the parent body of counter-extremism programme, Prevent. Like many ostensibly neutral institutions, Prevent has been subject to ideological capture since its inception. A recent video circulating on X, urging those undergoing Prevent training to report teenagers for posting stickers opposed to mass immigration, has alerted some to this. But the insidious absurdities stretch back over a decade.
A review of Prevent found that, in 2019, RICU had compiled a dossier of materials circulated by social media users described as “actively patriotic and proud”. The canonical texts of these far right radicals include: books by Peter Hitchens, Melanie Phillips, and Douglas Murray; Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan; John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government; Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France; The Lord of the Rings; Beowulf; C.S. Lewis; Micahel Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys; and, without a hint of irony, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Curiously, the Qur’an and Hadiths were not mentioned — despite Islamic groups being the predominant perpetrators of lethal terror attacks both in the UK and the world.”
https://courage.media/2024/11/25/how-islamists-influence-the-uk-government/
” … Micahel Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys …”
Well, he was once Minister of Defence for Thatcher.
Thanks for this link to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s platform. She does an incredibly good investigation into the whole murky web of alliances. I watched that Hope Not Hate documentary when the guy got a fake passport and also wondered thought how the hell he got away with that. It’s worth watching as it tries to discredit the writers of Aporia magazine as white supremacists,
How long?
Until we get a Reform Government I would think. Hopefully 2029.
Too many people still supporting the Fake conservatives.
Only if Reform start having policies now and start getting organised now. I can’t see it happening.
” hopeless Home Office”
Hardly “hopeless”. They are doing exactly what they think they are meant to be doing, which is continuing the establishment’s decades long project (really more than half a century now) to impose millions of people of alien cultures on the UK and for questioning this to be taboo.
The Home Office are staffed by personnel of foreign descent and white Leftard traitors, so it was ever thus.
Mass immigration into the UK started immediately post war. Home Office employees would have all been white British then. But the politicians wanted it and people went along with it- maybe they thought we needed the workforce to help reconstruction or we owed them for fighting for the Empire. White guilt was probably a thing even then. Powell was thrown under a bus.
“The Alleged Problem of Grooming Gangs” ????——-Always we are told not to cause “offence” and if we do it is a “hate crime”. Well you do not get much more offensive that telling thousands of young girls and their families that they were “allegedly” gang raped. —-This is disgusting wokery. How can this absurd Politically Correct Virus be eradicated?
Who wrote it? who commissioned it? all individuals should be removed from post, they are anti democratic and a danger to society, plus they clearly have zero empathy for the children who were raped and tortured by gangs of Pakistani men, as they prize the lie of diversity being our strength over the violence visited on young girls. We pay their wages for this?
all individuals should be removed from post
Absolutely right.
I think they must have an AI report writer with various defaults, press the button and ‘Far right’ appears as the answer to every question. From what I can tell, our civil service is idle and appalling.
‘ Should be removed’. Trump is doing a lot of removing across the pond but this is pie in the sky .. there isn’t a hope in hell of that kind of positive action in Ol’Blighty. Let’s face it our elites are too busy promoting ‘ being kind’ and pussy footing about the negative influence of Islam on the West. Wish I had faith in Reform but the rot is way bigger than someone like Farage can comprehend.
Two words spring to mind: “smoke” and “fire”.
Did Axel Rudakubana have any NCHIs recorded against him?
Brilliant question. I have submitted an FOI request. Doubtless it’s confidential as he was a “minor” at the time.
There are not enough candidates to replace large numbers of civil servants so we need a few effective non-politicised leaders (or politicised against woke, etc) together with new management boards.
Their appointment must be accompanied by changes to employment terms for the staff, annual reviews and other normal private sector supervision. Often the failures to follow policy will have to lead to dismissal.
not “enforced redundancy”, not transfer but dismissal with prejudice.
We don’t need to replace large numbers of civil servants.
We need to cut numbers by 50%.
Yes but if the other 50% are also disobedient lefties you’d need to get rid of them all. (I’m sure there are a good number who would follow orders, just need to work out which ones).
My considerable experience in the Civil Service confirmed that all those with right of centre views were workers. Those left of centre got lazier the more Marxist their opinions.
Whoops, posted before I read this.
My thinking exactly…..Why do we need more than, say, the 1990s. Where is this big state juggernaut taking us!
Current civil service numbers could be reduced by at least 50% and so long as the recruits had at least ten years private sector experience and a decent CV there would be no disruption to output, in fact it would noticeably improve. Anybody with left wing views would be barred.
Would Pixie Balls or some other government official care to start naming some of the apparently many “right-wing” extremists who are currently stomping the streets of Great Britain causing mayhem? I would love to meet a few for a chat, swap ideas and all that.
Je suis Right Wing.
The problem is that these political civil service appointments are already happening and have been happening (in all likeliness) since the days of the Blair governments. AFAIK, the so-called civil service is a Labour (and left Labour at that) dominated shadow government of the UK under direct influence of the extreme wing of the US democrats and only people happy with this direction of travel will be hired by all the other people who got already hired because of this.
The solution is thus not to politicize civil service recruitment but to depoliticize it again and to reassert government control over the civil service. Civil service unions financing lawfare suits to torpedo government policies should just be treated as people hired for a certain job (implement government policies) refusing to actually do it. All involved people to be dismissed immediately with prejudice. End of.
Yes we can’t have banana skins thrown in an aggressive way!
?
About the ousting of Dominic Raab:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65333983
There’s little detail about this available and hence, I don’t really have an opinion of this.
What I was trying to get at was that civil servants (or people acting on their behalf) using judicial review to shoot down government policies (the Rwanda plan) is de facto an abuse of process. Nobody was planning to deport civil servants to Rwanda (might be a good idea though) and hence, they had no standing in this, regardless of the contortions which were used to justify it. That was transparently just a pretext for refusing to implement a certain government policy for political reasons. If some civil servant was honestly convinced that the government was exposing itself to legal problems by acting in a certain way, he could and should have told this to the responsible government people but the decisions is ultimately theirs and civil servants are just executing agents. If a minister believes a and a civil servant believes b, a is what it’s going to be for the civil service.
I can see the system being swamped with self reported “crimes”, such as … my mother has called KS two-tier, come and arrest her, she won’t resist, as she is 92 and has dementia.
I am Spartacus.
This is how it went in Scotland, before the Law was amended.
The Human Rights Act is riddled with laws which undermine NCIHs. Freedom of belief, thoughts and expression; compensation, unlawful detainment, freedom from discrimination (yes, that can be applied to whites too, amazingly); no punishment without law; freedom from degrading treatment; liberty rights.
Now they can do their serpent thing with semantics as much as they want but the laws are stacked against them and they know it – hence their egg-shell approach when robustly challenged. If they want to continue to bring themselves down so be it. And as an aside, what company from overseas would choose to invest here when laws can be attempted to be so arbitrarily applied?
Well, would they like to inform the traumatised victims of brutal rape and abuse at the hands of the grooming gangs that it was all in their imagination? That their experience was just an “alleged problem” exploited by the “Far Right”… that old chestnut of a distraction from the spectacular failings of successive governments to address the most heinous criminal activity happening regularly on a disturbing scale?
Perhaps they would also like to look the victims of torture and abuse in the eyes and call them racist for making allegations of torture and abuse.
How long till the U.K. moves to political Civil Service appointments
We already have since Tony the Liar and his Liar-in-Chief Campbell forced out all the impartial civil servants whose duty to the state was not considered right for New Labour.
This is precisely what I was thinking
This is typical of institutions, universities, large corporates, MSM in Britain. It has become a self fulfilling prophecy. Namely, the mindset of the people who obtain the senior positions is that of the people who wrote this report. Over the last about thirty years, to even be hired into any reasonably senior roles the candidate had to spout the standard line on identity politics, liberalism, DEI or they had no chance. Even remaining silent is often insufficient. Hence the group think that produces such nonsensical reports. It is self reinforcing and the individuals have both gained employment and senior positions via this mindset. Essentially they have been rewarded for it. This is precisely why changing democratic governments actually changes little as much societal power resides in the leaders and employees in these institutions. It has always been like this but identity politics has been weaponised to make it worse. Nor is it simply a left wing problem, as the ‘top’ public/private schools and universities also push this nonsense, as they are preparing their pupils/students for roles in these very institutions. To fix it we need to reform the institutions and change the people leading them. Otherwise, nothing is going to change in Britain.
I just wish we knew the names of those Home Office civil servants who say things like: “The “alleged” problem of grooming gangs and claims of ‘two-tier policing’ are part of a “Right-wing extremist narrative” and police should record more non-crime hate incidents.”
These people do not represent the views of the majority.
If the UK ever gets a Trump-like breath of fresh air then these people need to be pinpointed now in readiness for the purge.
Re “a leaked Home Office report”…
Another meddling ‘report’…prepared by faceless bureaucrats.
Who ARE these people?!
This is what we need to know, the identify of these unelected people who impose their ideology on the community.
And make the ‘elected’ representatives accountable for their diktats, e.g. the Labour Party, which got into power in the UK on the votes of just 20% of the electorate, that is, 80% of people didn’t consent to being ruled by that shower.
“Stop Press: The Times says the lion’s share of these Home Office recommendations have been “rejected”
Not all? This means that some recommendations will be accepted.
It looks like the home office is full of left wing communists and totalitarianists. How could such a report so much against the British people come from anywhere in our government.
It seems like Starmer has been in there stamping his feet in a child-like way, insisting on his Trotskyist policies being imposed on all of us. That man is a traitor to British values.