UK Energy Bills: The Three Fixes That Could Save £15bn a Year

Breaking the link

The most absurd thing about Britain's energy market is the fact that we allow the global price of gas to set the price we pay for our own wind and sun; the green energy that could and should be reducing our energy bills and protecting us from the rollercoaster of global market prices is prevented from doing its job. Energy Independence can't be delivered while we let fossil fuels set the green energy price, no matter how much we build. We're paying billions more each year for our energy than we need to, we're exposed to global price shocks when we don't need to.

Breaking the link should be top of our agenda right now - we've published the road map, we know how to do it. Our energy bills are artificially high and the wider economic impacts of that are profound. It's a rip off. Let's end it.

Putting an arm around the North Sea

We support green energy projects with a fixed price (known as a CfD), this reduces risk because come rain or shine operators know exactly what price they will receive - and that lowers the cost of green energy.

We can do the same for fossil fuels projects in the North Sea. They're exposed to volatile global pricing at the same time as declining production - both increase the risk of a premature exit by the operators.

Let's put our fossil fuels on a level playing field with green energy, give price certainty, protect the jobs and investments already made, maximise extraction from what we have and achieve an orderly transition.

On top of that we can knock £10 billion a year off Britain's energy bills.

Putting an arm round the North Sea, with a CfD for fossil fuels, is logical, fair and it will bring our energy bills down.

Control the monopolies

Most of us don't think about how electricity and gas gets to our homes - it's actually via networks of pipes and cables operated by monopolies, mostly foreign owned and operating from tax havens. Collectively they've shipped tens of billions abroad in dividends in the last decade and failed to invest in the networks we depend on - sound a bit like the water companies? It is.

With one notable difference, these companies make a 40% profit margin, that's more than banks make, or venture capitalists - it's the highest margin in our economy bar none. Why does this matter? Because if we regulated them properly, they are regulated believe it or not - we could knock £5 billion a year off Britain's energy bills. We have a profit cap for energy retailers, how hard would it be to have a profit cap for these monopoly network operators?

Logical, consistent and fair. Control the networks.