UK posts record £30.4bn January budget surplus

Britain has booked a record monthly budget surplus — and, as usual, the headline is more flattering than the underlying picture.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the UK ran a £30.4 billion surplus in January, the largest for any month since comparable records began in 1993. The Evening Standard notes the number was roughly double last January’s and £6.3 billion above the Office for Budget Responsibility’s November forecast. ONS chief economist Grant Fitzner pointed out the obvious: January is the self-assessment tax month — a seasonal cash-in — and the improvement was helped by lower debt interest costs.

A government can look “strong” on a cash basis while the real economy remains dependent on an energy system that demands constant capital injections. On the same day, EDF — the French state-backed utility that effectively runs a large chunk of Britain’s zero-carbon generation — pledged another £15 billion of UK investment over the next three years, the Standard reports.

EDF’s promise of more capex arrives alongside worse operating performance in its existing nuclear fleet. EDF said output from its five active UK nuclear stations fell 12% last year, hit by a prolonged outage at Hartlepool, one of the country’s ageing advanced gas-cooled reactor sites. The company also reported UK EBITDA of £1.9 billion in 2025, down from £2.9 billion in 2024, blaming a roughly 20% drop in average realised power prices and the outage-driven production decline.

EDF still claims its nuclear fleet supplied about 12% of UK electricity demand last year and calls itself Britain’s largest generator of zero-carbon power. But the numbers sketch a familiar European pattern: governments celebrate a temporary fiscal windfall while the grid and generation stack require ever more directed investment, lifetime extensions, and mega-projects.

A large share of EDF’s planned spending is tied to Hinkley Point C — the long-delayed, heavily political project in Somerset — while EDF is also an investor in the government-backed Sizewell C project in Suffolk. Together, the two plants are marketed as providing 14% of UK demand and powering 12 million homes.

None of this is an argument against nuclear — quite the opposite. When policy turns electricity into a strategic asset, “investment pledges” start to resemble quasi-fiscal policy: capital allocation by regulated giants, underwritten by political risk-sharing, while politicians point at a one-month accounting surplus as proof of competence.

The UK’s January surplus is real cash — but it is also a seasonal spike. EDF’s £15 billion is real capital — but it is also a sign that keeping the lights on in a managed energy transition is less about market prices and more about who can still raise, guarantee, or mandate the next round of spending.