The UK government faces a clean binary: spend £15bn insulating up to 5 million homes, or grant licences for the Rosebank and Jackdaw oilfields west of Shetland. E3G's research makes the comparison stark. The warm homes plan would cut £1bn annually from household energy bills, generate a £1.6bn yearly GDP boost, and create roughly 50,000 jobs distributed across thousands of small businesses nationwide. Rosebank would create about 1,100 direct and indirect jobs, concentrated in the North Sea and primarily benefiting two companies — one of them, Equinor, a Norwegian state-backed investor. The fiscal arithmetic is worse than the job numbers suggest. While Equinor, Shell, and Ithaca Energy could extract £1.5bn in profits from Rosebank over its 25-year lifespan, the UK government faces a potential net loss of £258m through tax breaks and incentives. North Sea upstream tax relief already runs at £3.26bn against roughly £4bn in revenues for 2025-26. By 2030, tax revenues from drilling are projected to collapse to about £100m. Decommissioning costs — the bill for dismantling aging platforms — are estimated at £12bn, likely falling on taxpayers. Adjusted GDP impact tells the same story. E3G estimates the warm homes plan would boost GDP by 0.08%, while Rosebank would add approximately 0.025% on average over its lifetime at $70/barrel oil. If decommissioning costs land on the public, even that modest figure turns negative. The distributional picture matters. Warm homes spending would flow to low-income households facing the highest energy burden and draw in an additional £15bn in private investment spread across the country. Rosebank profits concentrate in three multinational companies, with the supply chain benefits Adura (the Equinor-Shell joint venture) claims — £35.3bn in 'UK economic value' between 2026 and 2035 — relying on uncertain multiplier assumptions about wider supply chains and employee spending, and crucially not accounting for more than £2.4bn in available tax reliefs or applying standard Treasury discount rates to future income. The political pressure is real. Ten major unions wrote to the government opposing Rosebank's licence. Scores of Labour MPs object. Six hundred scientists urged ministers to rethink. Yet energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh indicated a decision on Jackdaw was 'imminent' and Rosebank would follow, with both potentially exempted from Labour's manifesto commitment to halt new oil and gas licensing because they were already in the system. Meanwhile, the warm homes plan itself is under threat of cuts as ministers seek budget savings — the precise moment when the programme's economic case is strongest. Industry body Energy UK warned that 'watering down the warm homes plan sends mixed signals to a market that has been in a state of flux for far too long,' noting businesses cannot easily restart production once mothballed. The core question is not whether the UK should have an oil industry. It is whether public resources and political capital should flow toward a declining basin that enriches overseas investors and may cost taxpayers net, or toward distributed infrastructure that cuts bills for millions, creates fifty times more jobs, and builds long-term energy resilience. The numbers answer that question decisively.
