Shapps has brought a peashooter to an energy gunfight
Ben Marlow
5 min read
Grant Shapps walks on Downing Street in London - REUTERS/Peter Nicholls
Green day or groundhog day?
It was a neat jibe from Ed Miliband. But the Government’s latest energy strategy – its second in less than a year – had already been downgraded from being named after a 1990s California rock band with a penchant for smoking the green stuff to simply “energy security day” and then to “Powering up Britain”.
So it’s fair to say expectations were pretty low this time around. This was Whitehall spin at its most bland and uninspiring.
Still, it turned out to be fitting, at least.
It says something about the paucity of ambition that the UK currently possesses on such important issues that the best it could come up with was a desperate muddle of reheated and downgraded initiatives.
Labour's Shadow Secretary of State for Climate Change and Net Zero, Ed Miliband - Leon Neal/Getty Images
Indeed, so lacking is the Government in any concrete or new major policies to drive forward this country’s energy system that it sounds as though it was cobbled together at the last minute. Either we can’t afford to be bolder, or ministers couldn’t agree on the way forward.
Worse, it had been billed as a response to Joe Biden’s massive green deal, but there’s nothing in it that will make the White House sit up and take notice. In a document containing 1,000 pages, as Energy Secretary Grant Shapps proudly pointed out during his morning rounds of the television studios, there is no new investment.
Given how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has completely reshaped the world’s energy system, as well as exposed the extent to which Britain is so vulnerable to the wild seesawing of global energy markets, that is staggering.
Instead, senior ministers continue to whine about how Washington and Brussels have torn up the rulebook on trade by throwing hundreds of billions of dollars in loans, tax credits and other incentives at investors.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt says the UK doesn’t want to be dragged into a “distortive global subsidy race” but Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is industrial policy on a previously unforeseen scale, and it has kicked off a fierce battle to woo international capital.
While Britain sits on the sidelines complaining about protectionism, the industrial giants and technology trailblazers of the world will vote with their feet, shunning these shores in increasing numbers for the promised land, and taking investment and jobs with them in large numbers.
The Government’s response to this new economic order is little more than another list of aspirations, which either aren’t very aspirational at all, or are so ambitious that they risk being utterly fantastical.
Shapps has brought a peashooter to a gunfight.
Indeed, as Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, gleefully points out, this new strategy is most notable for its “glaring omissions”.
Our stance on onshore wind power remains a total fudge.
A de facto ban on onshore wind remains in place after an existing consultation was replaced with a new one by a Government that loves nothing more than deliberating and prevaricating.
Ministers wrongly believe that a decision to allow new wind farms to be built would prove politically contentious, yet numerous polls show that there is widespread support for wind turbines, including among Tory voters.
Hopes for a proper energy efficiency plan have been dashed.
The Great British Insulation Scheme should be forced to drop the first part of its name.
A rebrand of a previous scheme called ECO+, it aims to upgrade just 300,000 homes with grants, out of a total housing stock of 20m British homes.
Of those, more than 50pc are estimated to be rated D or lower.
The launch of Great British Nuclear to help deliver future investments in new nuclear power plants sounds promising – but the elephant in the room is that nobody wants to provide the tens of billions of pounds needed, at least not in the UK.
Nor does anyone want to actually build them, and the programme had been announced a year ago anyway.
A gamble on carbon capture is precisely that, though perhaps to a far greater extent than ministers are willing to acknowledge.
Shapps makes it sound so easy and alluring when he talks about the UK’s potential to store the “whole of Europe’s carbon for 250 years” under the sea but as swathes of the scientific community have pointed out, the technology is overwhelmingly unproven and yet somehow we’ve found £20bn to spend on this leap into the unknown.
Aside from a woefully inadequate £380m of funding for charging points, there is nothing of any note that will better prepare us for the 2030 ban on petrol and diesel cars.
Shapps has confirmed plans to stick with a deadline that will impose vast, unnecessary costs on the carmakers and drivers, and may even hollow out the UK car industry altogether.
If manufacturers can buy another five years in the electrification race by shifting production to Europe, at the same as shortening the supply chain, and being closer to the single market then what’s to keep them in the UK?
There isn’t even any talk of building the battery factories that will be required to sustain a domestic car industry in the future.
Meanwhile, despite a series of sops to the oil and gas sector, the windfall tax continues to act as a massive brake on investment in new projects.
So in trying to appease both the renewables industry and the fossil fuel sector, Shapps has somehow contrived to leave both camps disappointed, while doing next to nothing to boost energy security.
Even for this ineffective Government, that is quite the achievement.
