After a half-century wait, the United Kingdom now has an oil fund.<\/p>\n
Chancellor John Healey announced the creation of an Energy Wealth Fund at the Jackdaw gas approval announcement on Wednesday, with \u00a32bn of funding diverted from the existing National Wealth Fund.<\/p>\n
A selection of energy exporting countries, mainly in the Gulf, but also including Norway, over the years have amassed multi-trillion funds using oil and gas revenues to create epic national piggy banks.<\/p>\n
It has been a long-standing debate in UK economic policy circles. If neighbouring Norway has amassed a $2.4tn war chest from the same North Sea, where exactly did the UK’s sovereign wealth fund go? <\/p>\n
It is an apposite question on the week when the national debt also hit \u00a33tn for the first time.<\/p>\n
“The proceeds of this oil and gas coming ashore now can be invested for the future generations,” the chancellor said.<\/p>\n
“If we had done this when North Sea oil was first discovered in the 1980s, we’d have a British Sovereign Wealth Fund now that would be worth probably a trillion pounds.”<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, for the first time, Treasury officials actually calculated how much that missing British fund could have been worth. <\/p>\n
The trillion pound number comes from internal Treasury modelling. The assumption was that the UK’s historical North Sea receipts of \u00a3200bn had been invested, with no withdrawals and grown at a rate comparable to Norway’s. <\/p>\n
“Norway demonstrates the power of long-term investment: the government wants to learn from that principle, rather than copy its model wholesale,” one insider told me.<\/p>\n
It was a “missed opportunity” which “had we systematically invested those receipts, we could have built a huge national asset for future generations”, they said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a half-century wait, the United Kingdom now has an oil fund. Chancellor John Healey announced the creation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":809898,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-809897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/809898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}