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Energy secretary Ed Davey has said that he would not treat the findings from the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) into the energy market as binding.
Responding to a question by Utility Week at a Policy Exchange event on Tuesday Davey said: “I don’t think any government of any party should say they would be absolutely bound by them. I think that is going slightly too far.”
However the Lib Dem cabinet member added that the CMA’s recommendations “need to be taken very, very seriously”.
“[Any government] would have to have extremely good reasons for not adopting them. And they would have [to] – in the court of public opinion and in parliament – justify why they aren’t accepting the CMAs recommendations.”
The response comes after Utility Week exclusively revealed earlier this month that Labour would overrule the CMA recommendations and press ahead with their plans to reform the energy market regardless.
Despite Davey’s reluctance to treat the CMA findings as binding, he attacked Labour’s plans to overrule the CMA’s upcoming report as “absolutely astonishing” and that it showed a lack of respect to the competition watchdog by not waiting for its findings to be published before planning to introduce widespread reforms.
He added: “They are saying they know better than these people who have been doing all this work, saying they’re going to press ahead with their policy regardless.
“I think that is a shocking way of showing how you are going to govern a country. Absolutely shocking.”
The CBI has also issued a thinly veiled warning to the Labour Party in its 100-day ‘action plan’ campaign, warning that the CMA’s findings should be “sacrosanct”.
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