Not bad, especially when other ministers and backbench MPs are being asked to stomach means-testing the Winter Fuel Allowance. But it’s not anything like enough: according to NESO, hitting Net Zero by 2030 would require investment in Britain’s energy infrastructure to the tune of £40 billion a year.

The Energy Secretary might be the Treasury’s favoured son at the moment, but does anyone think he’s going to triple his budget?

Assuming for a moment he could work that miracle, he’d then run into all the practical and bureaucratic hurdles that make it so unnecessarily and abjectly awful at getting anything built. And a lot would need to get built. NESO says it would take 1000 kilometres of new onshore power lines, plus 4500 kilometres of undersea cables, to hit Net Zero by the Government’s deadline. Even that is just scratching the surface; industry and government projections suggest the green transition could require up to 460,000 kilometres of onshore cables by 2050.

In theory, and in normal times, Labour ought to have plenty of room to go big on rural infrastructure, given that it mostly impacts Conservative and Liberal Democrat-held seats. But having won so big, Keir Starmer now has lots of restive backbenchers with small majorities in just those areas. Once their local opponents start making hay over any new development, how long will Labour’s discipline hold on while getting all these pylons built?

It isn’t that the Government couldn’t make progress. It might have announced the Planning and Infrastructure Bill before working out what to put in it, but that will allow them to take suggestions from the National Grid, which has insisted that planning reform is essential to any green transition.

But at this point, the headline target is a zombie policy. It would be difficult even were the Government seriously committed to trying to hit it. But it isn’t: even as NESO insists that nuclear will be critical, the Chancellor seems to have stalled investment whilst the Treasury is recycling old money as new spending commitments.

The poverty of ambition is painful, especially on nuclear power. Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs) wouldn’t just help get the UK to Net Zero — it would then be a technology we could export, making a serious impact on global emissions while boosting manufacturing and trade. Once again, however, Britain is stalling while other countries push ahead with potentially transformational technologies, such as the nuclear-powered container ship recently proposed by China.

For now, the target will stick. But when it starts to get closer, and we’re totally unprepared for it, expect to see Labour pushing it back, just as did Rishi Sunak the ban on selling petrol cars. Let’s hope Miliband and co weren’t too pious about that.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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