Labour conference: Councils across Britain urged to ‘white label’ Robin Hood’s tariffs

Councils across Britain have been urged to ‘white label’ the tariffs of Robin Hood Energy at the Labour party’s conference in Liverpool.

They would be following in the footsteps of Leeds City Council, which last week launched a new supplier for residents across Yorkshire called White Rose Energy.

“As a Labour council you can now go out and through your own council come back to Nottingham and link up with us, and make your own energy companies by using our energy but calling it what you like,” Nottingham City councillor Steve Battlemuch said in a speech.

“They can set something up from scratch like we did. Or, they can buy into the energy that we’ve now got and what we call white label, which is to take the energy, call it whatever they want and market it themselves in their own area,” he told Utility Week afterwards. “Leeds City Council was the first to take us up on that and we’re in discussions with other councils.”

Battlemuch would not disclose which councils they were, but said there were “more than five, less than twenty”. He said the council was also engaged in discussions with social enterprises and that he had been approached by even more councils following his speech, adding “I think it’s a really exciting time”.

He accepted there were limits to how many would be able to take up the offer but said the council would manage things on a step-by-step basis: “We probably couldn’t go from one white label to twenty in a matter of days but we’ve got professionals that are working on this and will manage this in a professional way.”

Mark Bramah, the managing director of Municipia which is a consultant to Robin Hood Energy, touted some of the benefits of white labelling: “We’re not talking huge sums of money here… it’s very, very low start-up costs for people who want to get involved in setting up a white label. It’s not like you have to invest millions and millions of pounds.”

He said there was an “awful lot of risk” in setting up an energy company from scratch as “it’s not just the cost”: “You’ve got to have the expertise. Nottingham are extremely fortunate that they’ve got a really good energy team that they’ve drawn from the industry and it’s not possible for every local authority to do that.”

Robin Hood Energy has so far received an enthusiastic response from residents in Nottingham, according to Battlemuch: “People are engaged with the fact that this is their local council running something and they take a sort of civic pride in the fact that they can now get their energy from the council.”

He said the council was “particularly proud” of its commitment to offer the cheapest energy to pre-payment customers: “There’s been cuts in prepayment from the big six because we, and some pressure from government, have made prepayment an issue… We’ve seen evidence that that has brought down prices in the East Midlands.”

Robin Hood Energy became the first local authority-owned energy supplier since the nationalisation of the electricity industry in 1948 when it was launched in September last year. Bristol Energy became the second when it launched in February.

The thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research called for a city energy company to be created to serve London in April, and in June it was revealed that Reading Borough Council was in talks with other local authorities in the south of England about establishing “a joint arrangement to supply energy locally”.