So it has been announced in the recent budget that Britain is going to follow our European brethren, France and Germany in establishing a Government backed green investment bank. The proposal outlines how a central investment bank will be established using a combination of private and public funds.
The government is going to raise £1bn by selling off various valuable assets, such as the Channel Tunnel rail link, the Tote, the Dartford Crossing, the High Speed One rail link, Urenco and the Student Loans book. The Treasury then intends to persuade private sector investors to match this with a further £1bn. Although the Treasury has yet to decide who would run the bank, and how it would be structured, the plan is to make it a separate body, with a remit set by the Treasury to help finance projects that private sector investors would otherwise be reluctant to back. Already there have been detractors bemoaning the interference of the state in a realm that could easily, so it’s claimed, be supported by market forces. This however, has been swiftly brushed aside as a report from the BVCA’s Energy, Environment and Technology Board (EETB) argues that a well designed green bank could help accelerate private sector investment in low carbon projects.
All this will hopefully be good news to businesses such as ReGen. The Green Industry is only going to grow as we come to accept as a nation, our role in conserving what we use and consume. However, so much will hinge on how the money is used and where it is directed. Climate groups are already claiming that the sums discussed are “peanuts” compared to what will actually be required to secure our future. Some reports suggest £400bn is closer to the kind of figures that will be required over the ten years, so what happens now will be key in determining how successful this proposal will be to British business. Hopefully the injection of funding by government will be a big enough stimulus for private investment to become involved in more and more “Green” projects. There is still a degree of skepticism surrounding many of the new technologies and it is our hope that that these proposals will go a long way to validating what many of us are trying to achieve.
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