Pro-growth campaign launches radical energy plan to cut UK energy bills
Key Points
- Looking for Growth has urged Government to radically reform its energy legislation to protect consumers and slash household bills.
- In a draft Emergency Energy Bill, the pro-growth campaign argues for North Sea oil fields to be reopened and for Clean Power and Net Zero targets to be binned to ensure energy security for the United Kingdom.
- The group proposes that energy levies be scrapped and that auctions be held for grid connections, with the proceeds from both used to reduce consumer energy bills.
- While Government and parties including Reform and the Conservatives are considering policy changes related to some of these points, LFG maintains there is cross-party support and a desperate need for radical energy reform in the UK.
Campaign group Looking for Growth (LFG) has drafted an Emergency Energy Bill to push the British government into taking action to reduce energy bills for consumers.
Looking for Growth is a cross-party movement that positions itself as pro-growth, anti-decline. The group aims to reverse Britain’s decline by pushing the Government to adopt radical policies that deliver growth for the economy.
Its previous campaigns include a highly-publicised vigilante effort to clean graffiti off the London tube, which prompted TfL to hire permanent staff to remove graffiti, and the ultimately successful demand that Government accept all of the Fingleton Review‘s recommendations for unlocking nuclear power.
This week, the campaign launched an Emergency Energy Bill aimed at cutting energy bills for British consumers and businesses quickly and decisively, and it is has published a letter to the Prime Minister and Energy Secretary demanding that the Government adopt the measures it has proposed.
“Our energy system is broken. Our energy prices are some of the most expensive in the world. Last year, we were one power station away from mass blackouts,” the letter states.
“These costs make our companies uncompetitive. That means our industries are collapsing. They make British households poor. That means they are just surviving, not living.”
Looking for Growth said its bill has cross-party support, citing criticisms from Labour and Conservative MPs on the obstacles the current energy regulatory regime has erected against growth in the UK.
What’s in LFG’s Emergency Energy Bill?
The campaign group has drafted a “ready-to-pass” Bill that proposes six radical reforms to energy regulation in the United Kingdom.
It proposes the scrapping of all levies on energy bills, calling them “stealth taxes” which unnecessarily hike up the bills of of British people and have led to the Energy Department becoming a second Treasury.
The Bill also echoes recent calls to reopen North Sea oil fields to boost tax revenue and energy security. It says the North Sea Transition Authority should be renamed to the “North Sea Maximisation Authority” and should be free from the constraints of climate regulation for five years after the legislation comes into effect. The group argues that the tax revenue from this new oil income should be used to subsidise household energy bills.
LFG has also targeted Contracts for Differences (CfDs) in its proposed reforms, stating that new CfDs should be stopped altogether as it results in billpayers paying for big energy companies to throw energy away. The group said that by 2030, billpayers would have paid £8 billion in constraint payments, which refers to cost of billpayer money used to turn off renewable generators when the grid is overloaded and energy is wasted.
CfDs are at the heart of Government’s push to deliver clean power by 2030, a target which LFG says should be scrapped, calling it “arbitrary”. The group also proposes that energy regulators should no longer have a duty towards Net Zero and instead focus on minimising the cost of energy to consumers and businesses.
Lastly, the Bill aims to address the problem of the UK’s backlog for electricity grid connections by introducing an auction system, where projects bid for connection and the proceeds are, once again, used to subsidise energy bills.
The path to energy reform
The changes to energy regulation proposed by LFG are clear in their intention to deliver energy security and lower bills for Britain. However, they are a complete break with the Net Zero and Clean Power targets held by the government today and championed by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.
Discussion is already ongoing around some of the points raised in the Bill drafted by Looking for Growth. Reform has pledged to cut VAT and green levies on energy bills if it wins power in Westminster.
With the future leadership of Keir Starmer in question, some Labour MPs have also begun to diverge on policy over North Sea drilling, with Wes Streeting recently saying that he would like to see new drilling licences approved.
Additionally, the backlog of grid connections may not be too severe a problem going forward, as the National Energy System Operator (Neso) has already offered more than 700 clean energy projects in Britain a grid connection date. It also scrapped hundreds of speculative projects that were jamming up the grid connection process and unnecessarily compounding the backlog.
However, with the world reeling from the conflict in Iran, inflation soaring, and energy security becoming more important than ever in the age of AI, many worry that the pace of energy reform in Government is too slow to deliver the security and growth consumers need.
This is the position of Looking for Growth, which has called on consumers and businesses in the UK to sign its letter to the Government and demand that its Emergency Energy Bill is adopted.
“Our Bill is ready-made. It would cut bills dramatically,” the group said.
“The Government could pass it tomorrow, and the British people would see the benefits on their next bill.”
