Come on down
Incumbent Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to power on a manifesto promise to bring down energy bills by £300 by 2030. It now falls to Burnham to get bills under control.
There are options, according to the people around him.
Labour-aligned think tanks and some industry groups have argued for all so-called policy costs — which help pay for clean energy projects and for support to low-income households — to be taken off bills and put into taxation.
Starmer, who has long argued the only route to permanently lower bills comes from getting volatile fossil fuels out of the U.K. energy mix, started down this road at last year’s Budget, when his government transferred some of those costs off bills, saving the average household around £150 per year.
“There is a direction of travel that was set at the last Budget, where policy costs paid for by bills — a regressive way of paying for it — were taken into general taxation, a more progressive way of paying for it,” said Mathew Lawrence, director of the Common Wealth think tank, whose ideas are influential in Burnham’s transition team. “That is quite a compelling avenue to reduce bills at source and to pay for them more progressively.”
Lawrence co-authored a report for the Burnham-aligned Mainstream campaign group earlier this year, which promoted the policy as well as recommending cutting the price of energy up to a point deemed to be essential for households.
