Labour rules out supplier role for new public energy company

Sir Keir Starmer’s mooted new public-owned energy company will not be a supplier, the shadow secretary of state for business has confirmed to Utility Week.

Appearing at a Labour party conference fringe event on supporting vulnerable households, which immediately followed his party leader’s keynote speech on Tuesday afternoon (27 September), Jonathan Reynolds hailed Sir Keir’s pledge to set up Great British Energy as “excellent”.

Responding to a question from Utility Week, he clarified that the new company would not be a retailer.

“This is about the management of the investments, which we believe are essential to unlock these markets and opportunities,” Reynolds added.

Pointing out that many of the key players in the UK energy market are owned by state-owned foreign entities, he said the new company would enable British residents to capture a slice of the profits being generated by the transition to a decarbonised power system.

“This is not just about public money going in but about asset ownership and the state and people in this country as a whole benefiting from that transition.”

Energy UK’s director of advocacy, Dhara Vyas, told the same meeting that many companies are already investing in the UK power market.

“We don’t want to put them off. If Great British Energy is adding to that mix, it’s brilliant as long as it’s a level playing field for all of those companies.”

Tom Davis, head of corporate affairs at EDF Energy, welcomed the Great British Energy announcement in Starmer’s speech.

“If this is about giving government investment, that kind of stimulus to low-carbon projects, then we would welcome that,” he said, adding that it is “exactly the kind” of idea that should be looked if Labour wants to deliver its earlier pledge to decarbonise the electricity system by 2030″.

Davis said Labour’s proposal echoed the support that the existing government has pledged to help EDF’s new nuclear project at Sizewell off the ground.

He also said that even after the government’s recent energy bills support announcement, last week had been the “busiest ever” for the company’s call centres.

Davis also described as “shameful” the UK’s failure to get to grips with energy efficiency, adding that it should be approached like a major infrastructure project.

“We should run energy efficiency in this country in a way that we run national infrastructure projects, because that’s what it is. It’s a big national infrastructure project that happens on a micro level in millions of houses.

“You would never run a kind of big national infrastructure projects in the way we have run energy efficiency in this country with this stop-start, boom-bust approach. You should fund the whole thing from conception to completion and then you can lever your workforce and your supply chain upskill to deliver that.

“It’s pretty shameful in this country that we haven’t really got to grips with it.”

Reynolds also told the event, which was organised by the Institute for Public Policy and Research, that he backed immediate action to accelerate the rollout of heat pumps.

He said: “There are clearly already properties where heat pumps will be the right solution so let’s get on with the right mixture of incentives and government expenditure that will create the proper market there.”

Reynolds, whose first frontbench role was as a junior spokesman in Labour’s then shadow Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) team, said the party’s plan to recreate the ministry would enable greater focus on the issues it covered than is possible now they have been absorbed into Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

“There was far more time in Parliament to debate things like energy efficiency,” he said, adding that the scope of BEIS’ responsibilities are “too broad” to enable this to happen.

The future security of energy supply will be discussed at the Utility Week Forum on 8-9 November in London. Find out more here.