There are other things Burnham could do to keep buses cheap – rail services have a plethora of (poorly) targeted discounts, which affect a far larger portion of passengers than the bus equivalents. Extending these would be a sensible next step

Reducing the cap won’t do much to help most bus passengers – just a fifth of bus journeys cost over £2 – but the passengers it will help are disproportionately lower income

It’s good that Burnham has focused on buses rather than trains for his first intervention – buses are the favoured public transport of the poorest households most likely to be struggling with the cost of living, and particularly important for those without a car

Burnham’s instincts to turn to transport first are on the pulse of public opinion, the public service that people across the country seem most dissatisfied with

Why did Starmer not just shave a bit more off CDEL? Probably because there’s £7bn of new resource spend to find as well as more capital – so CDEL cuts (which don’t score) can’t satisfy the fiscal rules. New taxes, borrowing or spending cuts will be needed instead.

The PM announced £15 billion extra funding compared to the last Spending Review (SR), delivered over next four years (ie to 2029-30). The plan graciously includes a breakdown of the new settlements, totalling £298 billion.

And the implications for carbon policy won't be costless. Ultimately electric cars are the biggest and the cheapest plank to the government's plan to meet carbon budgets in near future. Unless Gov wants to ditch our legally binding targets, weakening the ZEV will add costs to meeting net zero

An unsung hero here is the ZEV mandate, which is pushing down on prices with discounts and big incentives for manufacturers to give EVs mass appeal. Shame we can't muster the same ambition for heat pump regs - MCS show HPs are still rising in price!

And the framework takes risks to tenant farmers seriously: we can't let land use change become a source of insecurity for those renting their land. The Law Commission review to ensure tenants are included in this transition looks like the right kind of intervention

There are other things to applaud - developing the data for making good decisions isn't flashy but it's necessary (and exciting for us wonks) and long overdue - h/t to @guyshrubsole.bsky.social's long decade of campaigning for this!

What we need next is a better picture of how we will make sure decisions match principles. The Government needs to direct where change happens, not just publish maps. The framework hints at spatial targeting of subsidies and strong use of the planning system - but the devil will be in the detail.

Now Defra has set out what has to happen, they will need to be tougher to make it happen. Defra's principles on where land should change use, including most importantly that it should be the "right use, right place" are exactly right.

The Government's set out modelling showing around 15% of farmland needs to change by 2050 for climate reasons. Publishing that breakdown sends an important signal about the scale of change required - and shows that renewables aren't the main story

We also need to protect tenant farmers, who don't get to make their own decisions on how land is used. They're some of the nations best but most vulnerable farmers. A fair transition can't sweep away productive tenants in favour of passive landlord income.

Land use is a different challenge. Nearly a fifth of farmland may need to shift away from food - mostly to forestry and restored peatlands (solar and energy crops will play a much smaller role)

The bad news: farmers can't absorb these costs. With razor-thin margins, even a 2.5% cost increase would cut average farm income by a fifth - from £43k to £35k. Farmers have almost no pricing power, so they can't just pass costs to supermarkets.

The good news: decarbonising food production shouldn't be ruinously expensive. Costs peak at ~2.5% of farm output. If passed to consumers, food prices would rise by comfortably less than 1% - some individual months last year saw bigger jumps.

The sector isn't starting from a position of strength to deal well with further burdens. In 2024, the typical family farm made enough profit to pay its owners just £6/hour - half the minimum wage. Nearly 1 in 3 farms lost money. Another quarter were only profitable because of government subsidies.

There's no silver bullet here. Unlike EVs for transport or heat pumps for homes, farming needs 30+ different measures to decarbonise - from greener machinery to changing what land is used for entirely. And this comes on top of nature targets and major subsidy reforms already underway.

The transition hasn't really hit UK farms yet, with emissions declining just 5% since 2010. That's set to change soon, and it should - delaying further would add £12 billion to the capital cost of meeting net zero

While esteemed colleagues won prestigious awards for great work last, I'm also proud to have won 2.5kg of smarties for best report title of the year, the best return on writing two words I'm ever likely to get www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications...

May be other factors but a) SW is bigger than the other regions b) the farms there are smaller so more of them

Salary sacrifice is a poor way of subsidising. More cash for those with higher tax rates (meaning more income) is the opposite of what we should be doing - getting solar panels onto the rooves of fuel poor families. Poorer families have less salary to sacrifice, meaning less or no subsidy for them

But this will inevitably affect some vulnerable households so must be balanced with consumer protection - a time of use price cap, seeing fixed prices in peak and off-peak hours, is one way to manage the risks posed by fluctuating prices.

We should start by making sure that households with the most 'flexibility' to contribute do so - that's those with big electricity intensive technologies like electric vehicles.

That would be a big shift for households, who largely pay the same price for electricity at all times of the day

So we need consumer protection too – a new regulated time-of-use with caps for peak and off peak would set consistent and fair prices for all who want or need a variable tariff. Crucially, this would also protect from short term price volatility that families can't be expected to manage

But that risks hitting other household types like big families and those with electric heating.

But there are ‘flexible technologies’ that can be shifted easily. A tumbledryer run in the morning won’t save much – but an EV uses enough electricity in peak times that average savings of charging overnight reach £120 a year

Those with children and unmovable work schedules will find the highest costs of moving to time of use, as they consume (slightly) more of their energy in the expensive peak hours. That means more costs of pricy peak energy and less saved in off-peak discounts.