The UK Government‘s Green Savings Bond

The Green Savings Bond.

There are a whole host of ways that a government can take to encourage a shift to a greener economy. The Green Savings Bond, the latest idea from the Westminster Government, is not one of them. 
 
Over the summer UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a plan to direct £15B of funding towards green projects to help decarbonize the UK economy. 

To achieve this he has chosen the good old Bond market, but with a wee twist, rather than using the traditional bond market where institutional investors look to hedge their riskier investments, by buying risk-free bonds from the government, he is after the publics’ savings. 

In the most basic terms, the Green Savings Bond scheme will direct some of the great British public’s savings towards green projects. 

So we have the headline: £15B of funding towards green projects. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

But we all know never to believe the headline. 

That £15B of funding towards green projects is across two years and will only be invested if the great British public chooses to hand that amount over to the government; there is no government top-up. 

So this headline figure is a maximum figure: it could, of course, be much smaller, and considering the callosum mismanagement of public funds during the pandemic by the conservative administration, I expect they will fall well short of that figure. 

To really understand the lameness of this initiative we have to delve a bit deeper into Bonds and the Bond market.

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