By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Labour’s tax raid on UK oil and gas companies will drive investment overseas and cost the country £13bn, new analysis suggests.
A report from industry trade body Offshore Energies UK (OEUK) said plans to further increase the windfall tax on oil and gas profits and scrap tax breaks would virtually halt all further investment into the North Sea.
The changes will cause “a reduction in capital investment from £14bn to £2.3bn from 2025 to 2029”. This would mean “a reduction of £13bn in the total economic value of the sector from 2025 to 2029,” OEUK said in its report.
I pointed out at the time that Labour’s plan to fund their green agenda by increasing taxes on North Sea oil and gas was self defeating. The amount of money raised was always going to be tiny anyway, and as expected its effect will be to drive away new investment, thus reducing govt revenues, not increasing them.
Even the clueless Miliband must have known this, which suggests that Labour policy was always deliberately intended to shut down North Sea production as quickly as possible, simply to appease their chums in XR.