Labour Is Making Its "Slowest U-Turn" On £28bn Green Spending

Labour insiders say the party has made a rod for its own back over the £28bn green spending pledge as a long internal debate over whether Keir Starmer should jettison the headline figure rumbles on.

On Thursday, hundreds of business representatives gathered in London's Oval cricket ground for an audience with Starmer and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves. It was the latest in a series of events where Labour's leading duo have met with some of the country's most influential financial big-wigs. For Starmer and Reeves – widely expected to become the next prime minister and chancellor – it was another opportunity to hammer home their message that Labour plans to be a pro-business government.

But the conference was overshadowed by growing uncertainty over one of Labour's integral economic policies. Was the plan to spend £28bn a year on green investment, first announced by Reeves at the 2021 Labour Party conference, still the plan? Or had relentless Tory attacks on the pledge, which had already been watered down to extend across a parliament, driven the safety-first Labour leadership to scrap the headline figure?

In an interview with Sky News on Thursday, Reeves did little to quell the growing speculation, dodging ten direct questions by Beth Rigby about whether the £28bn figure had been binned. Instead, the shadow chancellor repeatedly stressed the importance of Labour's fiscal rules when it comes to generating policy. 

PoliticsHome understands that the Labour leadership has decided to ditch attaching the £28bn figure to their green investment pledge as it's become an easy target for Conservative strategists devising attack lines ahead of the next general election, which must be called this year.

"It’s pretty obvious it was a