Who Pays, Not How Much

Wednesday’s Budget was an exercise in incidence: it mostly moves costs between payers rather than reducing them. The sentence that will matter longest is the shortest. No new policy costs go on bills until a Cost Control Framework arrives at the 2027 spending review, and nobody has defined “policy costs”. That perimeter, not the size of the envelope, is what the clean power pipeline turns on. For generators there is also one piece of genuine news, buried.