EXCLUSIVE: Bob Lyddon claimed powerful regional leaders, including Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, will be beneficiaries.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves (Image: Getty)
Rachel Reeves‘s multi-trillion-pound investment programme amounts to a massive “pork-barrel” operation designed to funnel billions into Labour‘s traditional heartlands at the expense of taxpayers in the South, a leading financial expert has claimed. The accusation comes just days before the Chancellor delivers her autumn Budget statement on November 26, 2025, amid mounting speculation of further tax increases and higher borrowing to plug gaps in day-to-day spending.
The plans under scrutiny were unlocked in Ms Reeves’s October 2024 Budget when she changed the fiscal rules to free up extra borrowing capacity, paving the way for £1.64 trillion in state-directed investment over the next decade across the Modern Industrial Strategy, the 10-year Infrastructure Strategy and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s clean-power 2030 mission.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham (Image: Getty)
Bob Lyddon, an independent economic consultant and former senior banker who specialises in public finance and EU-UK relations, told the Express: “Labour’s ‘investment’ plans are an enormous wealth transfer to their clientèle from everyone else. The historic centres of the Labour vote – heavy industry conurbations in Scotland, Wales and the English North and Midlands – will have money poured into them.”
Mr Lyddon warned: “Decision-making will be devolved to Labour and SNP barons like Andy Burnham, well-used to dishing out other people’s money but quite incapable of making any.
“These will be the potentates directing the ‘investments’ under Labour’s Industrial Strategy, and supervising the construction, under Labour’s Infrastructure Strategy, of new transport links between one Labour/SNP conurbation and another.”
“Taxpayers notionally throughout the country – but mostly in the South because nowhere else pays anything – will be put on the hook for hundreds of billions of pounds under a repeat of Labour’s Private Finance Initiative disaster from the last time they were in power: the final instalment of the £278 billion payable by taxpayers under New Labour’s PFI fiasco is due in 2052. That will be repeated, but on 10 times as large a scale for Labour’s £725 billion of ‘Social Infrastructure Investment’.”
Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband (Image: Getty)
Mr Lyddon continued: “Energy costs will go through the roof thanks to Ed Miliband’s Net Zero schemes, but don’t worry, the bills won’t, at least not for everyone. Taxpayers will provide subsidies for all bills, in a round-trip where they, in effect, subsidise themselves. But non-taxpayers – Labour’s clientèle – will get the subsidy without paying for it.
“If they still cannot manage to pay their bill, Ofgem now allows energy companies to cancel the bills of non-payers and to raise everyone else’s bill to take up the slack.”
Mr Lyddon added: “Reeves’ proposed Mansion tax is just further grist-to-the-mill: the bills go to Middlesex, Surrey, Bucks, Herts, Kent, Berks, and the money goes to Scotland, Wales and the English North and Midlands.”
He concluded: “Line upon line of financial subsidy to Labour’s favoured parts of the UK from everyone else: that is Labour’s ‘decade of national renewal’.”
Mr Lyddon, who first raised the pork-barrel allegation in a recent Conservative Post op-ed, estimates the true long-term cost could balloon to £6.7 trillion once borrowing and subsidies are included.
In a pre-Budget speech on November 4, 2025, Chancellor Rachel Reeves insisted the Government’s approach would address historic imbalances, saying past governments’ “long-term failure to invest in our regions has built growth on a narrow base – with some parts of the country forging ahead while others fall behind.”
In the same speech, Ms Reeves said her administration was “Ripping up the planning rules so we can build housing and infrastructure across the country”.
She also told the audience: “If we are to build the future of Britain together, we will all have to contribute to that effort…”
And: “we will go further and faster, on planning, on the industrial strategy, on reforming regulation… all to deliver growth throughout our economy, in all parts of our country.”
Ms Reeves concluded the speech by promising “A Britain with an economy that works for everyone.”
