Cost of Energy

John Milne Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Western. This country has been in need of a coherent national energy policy for a long time, as the lack of one has left us in a difficult place. Figures from June 2024 show that UK energy prices are 27% higher than those of our EU counterparts. That has made energy-intensive industries unviable and is a major problem for all of us. Many millions of households in England live in fuel poverty, and total energy debt across the country is estimated to be £3.8 billion—indeed, in my constituency, it is one of the biggest causes of people slipping into debt.

The part of the solution that I want to focus on today is community energy. It is welcome that the Government are getting behind renewable energy projects, but they are paying little attention to gaining public consent. The great advantage of community energy is that it is generated locally, requires no unpopular transmission systems and benefits the very people who have to put up with the local infrastructure and the potential loss of green space. The best way to get local consent for a new solar or wind farm is to let local people benefit from the energy directly.

Unfortunately, neither the previous Government nor this one have done enough to encourage the community energy industry. It remains too costly and bureaucratic for community energy companies to become energy providers. There is no sliding scale of fees to reflect the size or capacity of an energy project, which effectively rules out smaller enterprises. Furthermore, community energy companies have to sell the energy they produce at a fraction of its genuine retail value to registered suppliers. Absurdly, local communities are frequently unable to buy energy directly from the solar farm or windmill they can see from their windows. Communities are obliged to sell their energy back to the grid at a low price and buy it back at the marginal rate of gas, with transmission costs that had no need to be included. That is despite the fact that some community energy projects achieve a 75% reduction in per kilowatt-hour pricing.

Those obstacles are part of the reason why Community Energy Horsham in my constituency is struggling to get its solar energy project across the line. It has had council backing for a community-funded project to put solar panels on the Bridge leisure centre for some time, and I am sure it will happen at some point, but it has taken a few years already and the whole process is much more difficult than it needs to be.

We need a community electricity export guarantee to create a statutory right for sites with capacity below 5 MW that generate low-carbon electricity to export their electricity on their terms to an existing electricity supplier. We need a community electricity supplier services scheme to create a requirement on existing larger energy suppliers to work with community schemes so that they can sell the power they generate back to local customers.

Encouraging community energy is the democratic way to determine local land use. When local communities directly reap the rewards from community energy projects, it not only puts power—in every sense of the word—in the community’s hands, but demonstrates the benefits of a greener energy transition, which is important for our net zero targets and the planet.

I urge the Government to put public consent at the heart of their energy strategy—indeed, I could say the same about their planning strategy, but that is a whole other debate. The best way to do that is to empower community energy schemes. Never mind Great British Energy, I want to see Great Horsham Energy and, indeed, Great Everywhere Energy.