Growth and Great British Energy - a Labour dream?
Will Labour's Great British Energy plan be able to secure funding to provide more jobs and provide carbon free electricity? Professor Brian Scott-Quinn takes a closer look at the proposals for our Ballot Box series.
Labour have presented a proposal to ‘switch on’ Great British Energy (GBE) – a new publicly owned, clean power company for Britain. In some ways this could be good to return to the 'good old days' when the UK had a state-owned Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). The CEGB could make decisions based on the needs of the whole power system in the country, enabling it to co-ordinate policy for the whole industry. Different to GBE, however, CEGB owned most of the power systems, whereas Labour’s proposals do not involve a re-nationalisation of a system which was privatised in 1987.
So, the key question is what could this new arrival on the power industry scene achieve as a niche investor in the industry?
The problem of branding
GBE could be described as a ‘levelling up’ project or a ‘decarbonisation’ project – but Labour is avoiding association with both concepts, as far as can be seen from the extremely brief document available. That’s because the word “de-carbonisation” would not bring in many votes.
It’s a similar strategy to the naming of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the United States which is actually a decarbonisation act. In practice, it is more likely to increase inflation due to the huge subsidies to green power in an economy already at full stretch. But of course by so naming it, it’s more likely to bring in the Democratic vote than promising de-carbonisation.
Also reading through the Labour part document entitled ‘VOTE TO SWITCH ON GREAT BRITISH ENERGY’, it’s not directly marketed as about “levelling up” either - even though in practice that does seem one of its main objectives. But the expression “levelling up” has been so abused that it too is no longer the mot du jour.