‘The public isn’t against net zero. They’re waiting for it to pay them back’

In July, events in the Middle East will push the typical family’s energy bill to £1,862, a 13% rise. Despite important steps the government has taken to target help to those who need it most, the experience for many around the country is that bills remain higher than before the energy crisis began and, for all the welcome recent talk in Westminster about wholesale prices and price caps, too many families around the country are losing faith in any politicians ability to fix it. 

I spent my years before Parliament at the Bank of England working on climate risk. So I have little patience for the argument, now fashionable on the right, that the way to cut bills is to walk away from the transition – it isn’t. We heat our homes and set our electricity price with imported gas, and every household pays for that exposure. The route out of volatility runs through clean, home-grown power, not around it. 

But I want to be honest with my own side too, and new polling, released today shows that we need to double down on making the energy transition pay. 

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Polling from Startup Coalition and Public First found there is no anti-net-zero public in Britain. Instead, there is a public that has lost patience with a transition that asks them to pay without paying them back. Support for the 2050 target swings by up to 66 points depending on how you frame it: it collapses by 39 points when it’s pitched as an unspecified cost to taxpayers, and surges by more than 20 when it’s about lower bills, British jobs and energy independence. The biggest movement comes from exactly the voters we’re told are lost to us, older voters, Reform-leaning voters, when the offer is about them. 

56% of Brits feel the whole energy debate is about things outside their control and not about anything they can actually do. Trust in the Government to make bills affordable is split right down the middle. People feel locked out. 

This Government’s instincts on energy are correct. I was proud to vote for Great British Energy and for getting Britain building again. The clean-power mission is the right one. But it has so far been a story about the system; about the grid, renewable auctions, and planning reform. It is largely invisible from the kitchen table. And the part people can see and feel is the part that’s lagging. 

This gap, and the pace of change in an often overlooked technology crucial to the clean transition, gives us a huge opportunity to go further.

We must give power to the people, and help them kit up to make their homes part of the energy transition. The appetite here is enormous and almost entirely unmet: 82% say they’d take up new energy technology if they could sell surplus power back to the grid. A third would install plug-in solar (the panel-on-a-balcony kit that made over a million German homes their own little power stations). Two-thirds would buy the tech if it were sold in the middle aisle of Lidl. 

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What’s standing in the way isn’t engineering or appetite, but unfinished policy. We’ve opened a consultation to legalise plug-in solar, which is genuinely welcome, but currently it explicitly leaves out the battery, which otherwise would help deliver a step change in savings. That’s why we need to finish the job by speeding up the finishing touches on plug-in solar and then cracking on with batteries as soon as possible. 

Just this week Octopus Energy announced they’re planning to get batteries to households across the country. Fuse Energy is also planning to double down on this tech. ESME energy have been helping households in my own constituency save through battery installation. These are British scale-ups delivering the transition to the masses – we should be helping them to reach as many as possible, as fast as we can. 

I came into politics because I believe the climate transition can be the great fairness project of our time, but only if working people are its beneficiaries, not its bill-payers. The public are ahead of Westminster on this. They’re not asking us to abandon net zero. They’re asking to feel it in their pockets, soon. Reform offers them nothing but nostalgia and higher bills. We can offer them power – over their own energy and their own money.

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