All hands on deck (chairs)
When the ship of state lacks direction, crowding the bridge with more Cabinet Officers and unfolding more deckchairs for the crew, will not avoid any icebergs.
Last week we had 30 around the Cabinet table - now there are 33. By statute there should be a maximum of “21 Cabinet Ministers excluding the Lord Chancellor.”(1) This changes the dynamic of those in the room from being decision-makers to being part of an audience.
Worse still, Commander Sunak is steering by hindsight. The policy of reducing the size of the civil service to pre-Brexit numbers has been scrapped. More deck chairs are being made available and the crew can work ashore if they like. When I grumbled about a senior Department of Health civil servant working from Gloucestershire, he told me he had just had approval to move his office to Cornwall…
A zero carbon 2050 implies that almost all energy will take the form of electricity. That rests on three legs: renewables, nuclear, and fossil fuels. Back in April, Boris Johnson recognised nuclear as the key to minimising fossil fuels emissions because renewables are unreliable. On more than 180 days in any year wind only produces 4GW (2% of electricity needs) at some stage of the day or night.
Remarkably, this fundamental issue is not even mentioned in the BEIS 2050 projections. (2) Johnson clocked it and created Great British Nuclear (GBN) to deliver it. Purser Jeremy Hunt, however, answering a question at an informal gathering of Tory MPs, replied that “Boris Johnson’s ambition to build one new plant every year for the next decade was unfeasible in the present environment."(3)
That means fossil fuels will remain the key leg. The current artificial pricing which is responsible for their record profits has little to do with Mr Putin and everything to with the government allowing them to base wholesale prices on alien products. The UK was buying very little gas from Russia: Norwegian pipelines were an issue and so was using the foreign gas market to set the prices for UK renewables. (4)
Another example of steering by hindsight is the re-merger of domestic and international trade departments. International trade used to be part of the domestic business department but its relationship with the Foreign Office did not work so UK Trade & Investment was formed in 2003 as a joint subsidiary of the two departments. That proved useless, partly because the three cultures did not mix, and in 2016 the Department for International Trade (DIT) became a stand-alone ministry in anticipation of Brexit. (5)
Now Commander Sunak is taking us back to where we started and history will repeat itself. All that said, dedicating one department solely to energy/net zero is a good idea but Lieutenant Shapps should be given his own lifeboat to row, free of constraint by the Treasury. Captain Hands, meanwhile, should be facing the titanic problem before him, and should clear his bridge of those looking back.
(2) www.gov.uk
(5) https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-international-trade