Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to address rising electricity prices, in the light of data released by the Department of Energy and Climate Change showing that prices in the rest of the EU15 countries are not rising.

The Government wants to make sure that the cost of energy is affordable, fair and internationally competitive, both for businesses and households.

The recent Committee on Climate Change report on the impact of energy policies on consumers’ energy bills found that energy efficiency policies bring down bills and outweigh the cost of other energy and climate change policies for households.

The Industrial Strategy Green Paper, published in January 2017, announced our intention to commission a review to look at the cost of energy and the opportunities to reduce the cost of achieving our decarbonisation goals in the power and industrial sectors.

The latest BEIS published international energy price comparison statistics show that medium-sized domestic electricity prices including taxes rose in most other EU15 countries in 2016 compared to 2015. The UK electricity price, however, fell over the same period. Prices are expressed in pounds sterling and the relative price increase across the rest of the EU15 is mainly due to pound/euro exchange rate changes.

Over the same period, electricity prices for industrial users increased across most EU15 countries but were broadly unchanged in the UK. As with domestic price comparisons, exchange rate movements will have contributed to increases in electricity prices for other EU countries when expressed in pounds sterling.