Sir Keir Starmer is set to confirm on Thursday that Labour is scaling back a £28 billion green investment pledge following weeks of uncertainty.
The Labour leader will announce the latest u-turn despite insisting for weeks that he intended to meet the commitment.
Sir Keir used the £28 billion figure during an interview just this week.
He said: “We want to have clean power by 2030…that’s where the £28 billion comes in, that investment that is desperately needed for that mission.”
Labour originally promised in 2021 to invest £28 billion a year until 2030 in green projects if it won the next election.
But last year the party said the figure would instead be a target to work towards in the second half of a first parliament.
Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves previously said Labour would be prepared to borrow to invest but only within her fiscal rules.
Labour sources said last week that the pledge was now “dead”, an assessment that was bolstered by comments by Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, that the target would now “move around”.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has said that income tax would need to rise by four per cent to fund Labour’s £28 billion green spending pledge.
He also claimed that an alternative approach to increase spending by £28 billion while sticking to fiscal rules would involve increasing corporation tax by eight per cent.
Ms Reeves last week repeatedly refused to set out whether she is standing by the £28 billion-a-year figure, casting further uncertainty on whether the spending pledge would be kept.
Last month, Labour sought to kill off a report the target had been abandoned by saying it was “committed” to ramping up the investment “subject to our fiscal rules”.
Asked about the pledge in an interview aired on Tuesday, Sir Keir told Times Radio: “We’re going to need investment, that’s where the £28 billion comes in. That investment that is desperately needed for that mission.”
“You can only understand the investment argument by understanding that we want to have clean power by 2030… We need to borrow to invest to do that.
“That’s a principle I believe in and I’m absolutely happy to go out and defend. And of course, what we’ve said as we’ve got closer to the operationalisation of this, is it has to be ramped up, the money has to be ramped up, the £28 billion et cetera, and everything is subject to our fiscal rules.”
He said he had “been unwavering in relation to the mission – clean power by 2030”.
