The letter was in the Guardian this morning:
Simon Jenkins is right to call for quantitative easing to be used to boost economic activity (We should cash-bomb the people, not the banks, 27 November), but wrong to suggest it should be spread to everyone indiscriminately. What is instead required is a well targeted “green infrastructure QE” which would stimulate the economy, boost employment and tackle climate change countrywide.
This would be achieved by working towards making the UK’s 30m buildings super-energy-efficient, dramatically reducing energy bills, fuel poverty and greenhouse gas emissions. The programme would tackle the housing crisis by building affordable, highly insulated new homes, predominantly on brown field sites. It would require finance of the order of £50bn a year. If this seems ambitious, recall that between 2009 and 2012 the Bank of England e-printed £375bn of QE, the equivalent of over £6,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. This huge sum mostly benefited banks and investors by inflating house prices, stocks and commodities. It had little impact in terms of generating real economic activity on the ground.
The form of QE we propose by contrast would provide job security and local business opportunities and rebalance the economy, since its infrastructure improvements would take place in every city, town, village and hamlet in the UK. In turn this could provide the impetus to unlock massive private co-funding from pension and insurance companies through to individual savers.
The “jobs in every constituency” inherent in green infrastructure QE means that it should become a political imperative for all parties in the run-up to next May’s election.
Caroline Lucas MP
Green party, Brighton Pavillion
John Sauven
Director, Greenpeace
Neal Lawson
Chair, Compass
Dr Richard Dixon
Director, Friends of the Earth Scotland
Lord Teverson
Liberal Democrat
Richard Murphy
Director, Tax Research UK
Ann Pettifor
Director, Policy Research in Macroeconomics
Jeremy Leggett
Founder and chair, SolarAid
Tony Greenham
Head of finance and business, New Economics Foundation
Jonathon Porritt
Andrew Warren
Chair, British Energy Efficiency Federation
Joanne Wade
Director, Association for the Conservation of Energy
Catherine Howarth
Director, ShareAction
Colin Hines
Convenor, Green New Deal Group
Susie Parsons
Director, Lasting Transformation Ltd
Tony Juniper
Charles Secrett
Founder, The ACT! Alliance
Andrew Simms
Fellow, New Economics Foundation