Good Policy, Damaging Execution

The frustrating fine print in Burnham's bus fare cap

On Andy Burnham’s third day as Prime Minister, he’s announced that bus fares across the country will be capped at £2 for a single (excluding London, which has its own cap).

Wonderful stuff!

Cheaper and more accessible public transport. Just what the country needs to tackle a range of problems, such as lowering urban air pollution levels, improving rural connectivity, and reducing emissions for the domestic transport sector (currently, the UK’s largest emitting sector).

What a simple, sensible, albeit pretty obvious policy to introduce.

Until you notice where the money is coming from.

To fund this policy, expected to cost somewhere in the region of £500 million, Burnham’s government is ‘reprioritising’ money that was originally earmarked for the Department of Energy Security and Net-Zero.

‘Reprioritising’ may be more politically palatable, but let’s be clear what this word means in practice; cuts.

Cuts to the department charged with securing cheap and clean domestic energy sources and protecting British bill-payers from global energy market volatility.

It’s good that the government is not immediately borrowing money to fund its policies, but there were certainly better places to get this money from. If the Government are set on ‘reprioritising’ its budget, a great place to start would have been the £17.5 billion in subsidies and tax breaks afforded to the fossil fuel industry annually.

Coupled with his desire to approve of further North Sea oil licences, something that even the ecologically-uninterested Keir Starmer didn’t attempt, it is looking increasingly likely that Burnham is not the leader we need to navigate our ever-deepening ecological crises.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a pattern with Burnham’s premiership; short-term progressive policies that could earnestly improve the lives of the nation’s poorest, muddled in with a blatant disregard for the environment, climate breakdown, or the reality of planetary sciences.

We still hope to be proved wrong; the crucial, definitive, first-and-final tests will be whether or not Burnham increases North Sea drilling, whether he treats the emerging El Niño as a crisis demanding a well-resourced national resilience plan, and whether he releases the full version of the suppressed National Security Assessment on Ecosystem Collapse - and uses it to pivot into taking this whole essential matter seriously at last.