It is “bold action” to boost UK competitiveness, claimed the government. Not everybody shared that assessment of the British industrial competitiveness scheme (Bics), the long-awaited plan to cut electricity bills for UK manufacturers by up to 25% – or, at least, to cut them for a subset of firms that are aligned with the eight chosen sectors of the “modern” industrial strategy.

“Gas intensive industries in the UK have been shamefully ignored by the government in this announcement – it’s a total disgrace,” said Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB union, banging the drum for the likes of ceramics-makers and brickmakers that aren’t deemed modern enough for support. Employer bodies mostly did the polite thing of welcoming government assistance of any form before using phrases such as “drop in the ocean”.

And, it’s true, £600m a year across 10,000 companies isn’t much. In the government’s defence, one could say Bics has been expanded from the 7,000 firms advertised at the initial announcement last summer. In addition, a back-dated feature has been introduced: the scheme will still start in April next year, but qualifying firms will then be able to claim what they would have got.

Complicated? You bet. And the complications are only magnified in the operational detail. You don’t just have to be in a “frontier” or a “foundational” industry that serves the frontier-pushers; a further qualifying criterion will be applied to electrical intensity across product lines. So this scheme isn’t just targeting sectors in the industrial strategy – it is targeting products within those sectors. If you jump through all the hoops, then you get relief from three policy costs on bills, including two green levies, worth up to £40 per megawatt hour.

There are two big-picture points here. First, the scheme came with the clearest acknowledgement to date by the government that the UK’s sky-high cost of energy for business – the highest in the developed world – is damaging competitiveness and growth. For the targeted areas, there is now an ambition to get electricity prices in line with European averages.

Second, the government can see that the thicket of policy costs and levies on bills lies at the heart of the problem. Thus the carbon price support mechanism, a charge on generators that is passed on to bill payers, is being abolished, having served its purpose of driving coal off the grid (though why it takes until April 2028 to actually kill it is a mystery).

But then one comes back to that modest nature of the £600m. This is really a debate about how to distribute the costs of energy transition and new grid infrastructure. Many other European countries including Germany take a greater chunk of policy costs into general taxation in the name of keeping industry alive and competitive. In the UK, the habit has been to shove it all on to bills. Now the principle has been conceded that, in some areas of industrial activity, there needs to be some form of rebalancing.

In an imaginary world without fiscal constraints, one can imagine a bigger scheme with less laser-like targeting. It would also run to several billions of pounds, which is presumably why Rachel Reeves won’t go there. Treasury officials, it is said, remain unconvinced that a wider scheme would pay for itself over time in terms of higher growth and tax receipts.

Thus Bics can only be viewed as an unsatisfactory fiddle. It acknowledges that nose-bleed electricity prices are a structural problem, but tries to pretend they’re only an issue for a narrow section of industry. There is a risk the government thinks it’s cracked the competitiveness challenge. Sadly, it’s more than a £600m-a-year fix.