Key events
Ed Miliband pledges that Britain will ‘never again’ face an energy bills crisis
Emily Dugan
Ed Miliband has pledged that Britain will “never again” face an energy bills crisis as he tries to wean the country off fossil fuels.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, the energy security and net zero secretary said:
Millions of people around our country have suffered from the worst energy bills crisis in decades in our country and this government says: Never again … And the only answer to never again, is to get off fossil fuels.”
Introducing the government’s legislation to create the public owned company Great British Energy, Miliband said that a reliance on fossil fuels left the country dependent on global markets.
“I can’t control what Putin is doing and geopolitics drives energy insecurity. We’ve got to get off that and look, we’re willing to have this argument,” he said
Miliband also pledged that the move was “going to lead to lower bills over the parliament because every solar panel we put up every onshore wind turbine we build gives us greater energy security and lowers our exposure to these gyrations of the fossil fuel market.”
Labour defends GB energy plan amid concern over funding
Good morning and welcome to the Guardian’s latest UK politics live blog. I’m Amy and I’ll be bringing you updates today.
The legislation to create Great British Energy (GB Energy) will be introduced at Westminster today.
Labour has vowed to create a publicly owned energy generation company headquartered in Scotland to drive the government’s goal of making the UK a “clean energy superpower”. The exact location of the HQ will be revealed “soon”, the government said.
The secretary of state for energy security and net zero, Ed Miliband, has been on the media rounds this morning and he told the BBC’s Radio 4 Today Programme that GB Energy is a “crucial tool” to tackle the country’s energy insecurity and the climate crisis. He said it would “give us that energy security we’ve so sorely lacked for many decades in this country”.
Miliband said:
The central mandate on which this government was elected was that our exposure to fossil fuels lead to the cost of living crisis and our mission is to become a clean energy superpower.”
Asked about Labour’s plan to not issue any new gas and oil licences in the North Sea and how critics have said it could increase the UK’s dependence on foreign energy, Miliband replied:
If fossil fuels had given us energy security we wouldn’t have seen the terrible cost of living crisis that we’ve seen over the past two years.
The energy company will be given £8.3bn of public money over the course of the parliament to invest in green technologies, with a target to develop an extra 20-30GW of offshore wind power through a tie-up with the crown estate.
Critics have argued that a substantially larger sum of money is needed for changes to be implemented. Defending the plan, Miliband said:
This is about private and public investment together. This is a government in a hurry on behalf of the British people.”
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