Another day, another story about Labour’s plans to ditch its pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green investment. The Guardian reports that party sources say the policy is destined for the chopping block – despite Keir Starmer saying on Thursday at the party’s business conference that the plan to spend £28 billion a year on green investment in the second half of the parliament remains in place so long as it meets the party’s fiscal rules. Notably, his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves was less effusive, refusing to commit to the policy despite being asked ten times in a Sky News interview.

As I say in this week’s magazine, the general expectation in both the Labour party and Conservative HQ is that Starmer and Reeves will junk the headline figure after the spring Budget, blaming the Tories for using up all the fiscal headroom. Reeves appeared to hint at this sort of timing on Thursday when she spoke about how Labour would need to see what the Tories did in its remaining fiscal events (the spring Budget being the main one) before confirming its plans more widely.

MPs have noticed that shadow treasury figures tend to talk less about the £28 billion than Starmer

While the scheme (announced in 2021) makes up a large part of Labour’s economic strategy, rising borrowing costs mean it has already been scaled back once. In the words of one party figure, the spending commitment has become an ‘albatross around our neck’. The Tories plan to run an aggressive campaign arguing that the pledge will inevitably lead to tax rises. It’s why it tends to be the figures on the campaign side who are pushing hardest for it to go. They see it as an electoral liability.

For some in the shadow cabinet, even hearing the figure repeated is a source of frustration. ‘It is very Labour to talk about how much we are going to spend rather than what it will actually do,’ says one shadow minister. Darren Jones, Reeves’s deputy, says the pledge has been rendered out of date by rising borrowing costs and the level of private sector capital.

As things stand, the party is in a no man’s land on the policy as speculation runs on and the £28 billion figure is mentioned sporadically by Starmer. There has consequently been some briefing against his chief of staff, Sue Gray, who is accused of being sympathetic to the pledge to avoid an embarrassing U-turn. But some shadow cabinet members see this as a classic example of the Labour old boys’ club blaming the woman rather than the man she works for. ‘Sue is a true sister,’ says one supportive colleague.

This confusion was on full display on Thursday when an otherwise successful business conference made more headlines on green spending than Reeves’s promise to cap corporation tax to give business stability and clarity. It hasn’t gone unnoticed by MPs that shadow treasury figures tend to talk less about the £28 billion than Starmer.

If Starmer does junk the headline figure, he will open himself to a new line of attack. As well as being accused of yet another U-turn, the Tories will attack Starmer’s pledge to still achieve clean power by 2030 – asking how he can do that if the money isn’t there. Meanwhile, some on Starmer’s own side would take the axing of the £28 billion as evidence that he lacks vision.

But the risk Starmer currently faces is that by neither doubling down on the policy nor scrapping it, he looks indecisive at a time when his party is trying to pitch itself as the stable option on the economy.