Ed Miliband has made voters a big promise: he will bring down energy bills by £300 a year in time for the next general election.
Unfortunately, reality has not yet matched up to the Energy Secretary’s lofty ambitions: bills are higher than they were when Labour came into office.
And things could get worse. Octopus Energy, the UK’s biggest domestic supplier, says that costs for households are on course to rise by another 20 per cent in the coming years.
The Government cannot allow this to continue. It was the soaring price of energy that really kicked off that cost of living crisis which helped bring Labour to power – how could ministers not understand the importance of keeping bills under control?
Miliband is adamant that he does get it. His “clean power by 2030” plan – removing fossil fuels from the electricity grid within five years – is designed to reduce costs as well as helping the push for net zero. But up until now, all the signs have been that greenery comes above affordability.
Experts are increasingly concerned that the Government will “lock in” higher prices for decades to come, by offering renewable energy providers lucrative long-term contracts – while consumers face ever-higher levies on their bills to help subsidise the state’s environmental obligations. Meanwhile Miliband rejected the idea of a new pricing system which would have given cheaper electricity to homes located near green infrastructure, apparently worried about the perception of a “postcode lottery”.
To be fair, ministers have finally woken up to the problem. They are considering knocking VAT off energy bills at the Budget, and other schemes targeted at the least well-off. These would be an easy populist win in a Budget likely to be dominated by bad news on tax.
But there is a strong case that a wholesale change of mindset is needed. In a new paper published on Thursday, the Tony Blair Institute – hardly a bastion of climate scepticism – calls for a shift in Government policy from “clean power” to “cheap power”.
The think-tank makes clear, alas, that there are few easy answers which would make a big difference to the current level of bills – but it argues that over the next five years, it will be possible to reduce costs through changing the focus from net zero at all costs to boosting the supply of power from all sources, including by encouraging innovation that goes beyond just trying to ramp up wind and solar energy.
The details will inevitably be highly technical, but the stakes are high. It is not the current Goverment’s fault that we are in such a pickle: part of it is merely bad luck that we do not have the shale gas of America, the hydropower of Scandinavia or the reliable sunshine of Southern Europe, and part of it is a lack of foresight from previous administrations which did not take bold decisions such as investing in a new generation of nuclear plants.
One reason for Labour to be worried is that voters will not re-elect the party if it is not seen to be ruthlessly focusing on improving their lives in the here and now, rather than shooting for utopian goals in the far-off future. The easy answers peddled by insurgent forces such as the Greens and Reform UK will prove attractive to an electorate facing a continued economic squeeze.
Another is that without action on energy bills, the net zero agenda will appear increasingly ugly to the general public. Support for action on climate change is broad, but shallow; there is evidence that many people are fairly tentative in their concerns about the environment.
Reform and the Conservatives have already ditched their support of the official net zero target, which is to eliminate the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. The Tories insist they will help protect the natural world in other ways – but Reform comes close to dismissing climate change as a major issue altogether.
Political elites have tried telling voters they must eat their vegetables for the greater good. It does not work. The public needs confidence that their lives are improving year on year – if that is the case, they will back high-minded goals at the same time, but if not they will simply prioritise their own economic circumstances instead.
Time is running out for Miliband and his colleagues to explain exactly how their green agenda can be executed without making ordinary people suffer through higher bills. It is essential that they succeed.
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