In Detail, In Brief: Making Britain more resilient against energy shocks
- Bristol South
- 5 hours ago
- 4 min read
Recent conflict in the Middle East has brought home how dependence on volatile international fossil fuel markets has left this country vulnerable. We need to get to a place where events beyond our control do not lead to everyday essentials becoming unaffordable.
The economic plan pursued by this Government since Labour was elected in July 2024 has been showing its benefits – going into this conflict, inflation was at 3% as opposed to over 5% when Russia invaded Ukraine, easing the pressure on consumers and mortgage-holders. The choices made by the Chancellor at the Autumn budget to raise revenue gave us a further buffer against the disruption that this conflict is bringing.
However, equally important are the actions Labour has taken to build out home-grown, carbon free energy generation. Every megawatt generated by renewable sources of energy or through nuclear power stations and small modular reactors is a megawatt we don’t have to generate through fossil fuels, bringing us closer to the point where the price of oil and gas no longer controls our destiny.
The Government has worked to bring forward over £90 billion of private investment in clean power this parliament and ran the biggest offshore wind auction in European history last year. We are also bringing the next renewables auction forward to this July. These milestones support our manifesto commitment to get to clean power by 2030.
We also commissioned the Fingleton Review to look into the barriers that have slowed down the build-out of new nuclear power in our country and have accepted the recommendations so that we can get more of this reliable, zero-carbon power onto our grid.
Under 14 years of Conservative-led governments, a golden opportunity to use historically low interest rates to invest in our outdated grid infrastructure and into decarbonised electricity generation was missed. We now have to make up for lost time, but changes made by the Chancellor to her fiscal rules are enabling record investment in a single parliament.
The Labour government is also responding to the situation in the Middle East in ways that will bring tangible savings to households in Bristol South. We have taken the important step of allowing the sale of low-cost, easy to install plug-in solar panels for the first time in this country. This technology has been used widely in other European countries like Germany and means that a solar panel placed on a balcony or on the roof of a shed can simply be plugged into a mains socket and will start providing electricity to the household. That means less power is pulled from the grid and households start saving money right away.
Those panels will be for sale within months.
Natural gas is not only used for electricity generation but for home heating and we are taking important steps to future-proof our housing stock and build our resilience.
We have already expanded the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, increasing the grant amount to £7,500 for eligible low carbon heating solutions such as heat pumps and now we are going further by bringing in the Future Homes Standard for all new homes from March 2028. These new rules will mean that all new homes will be built with solar panels and zero-carbon heating. These well-insulated homes will start their life off the gas grid, protected from the roller-coaster of international fossil fuel markets.
For existing homes, the Government’s Warm Homes Plan, published in January of this year provides a blueprint for cutting bills, and for safer, more comfortable homes for people across all tenures: from homeowners to private and social tenants. The plan is backed by £15 billion of public investment to upgrade up to 5 million homes and lift up to a million families out of poverty.
Locally, constituents have raised concerns with me that the Green-led administration on Bristol City Council is not acting quickly enough to provide residents in Bristol South the opportunity to make use of tried and tested technologies inexpensively and conveniently.
For example, a pilot scheme which would allow residents to install so-called “pavement gullies” (which allow EV charging cables to be safely led from a residents’ house to their vehicle parked on-street) has been repeatedly delayed, with residents only now able to express their interest in the pilot after nearly 6 months of delays. A recent report in the Bristol Post suggested that in-lamppost charging ports for EVs, a technology that has existed for many years, are 10 times more expensive than charging at home. This delay and expense risks making converting to an EV in Bristol much less attractive, even though these vehicles are better for the environment and aren’t subject to volatile prices at the pump.
Tackling our dependence on fossil fuels and building our resilience to shocks will take work across all of these areas of the economy. Reform and the Conservatives would slam on the brakes, locally, the Greens show no urgency in implementing solutions, but this Labour government will continue to drive that work forward.
Photo: "Minerva Heights Chichester - 2021 new build - some with south facing solar panels" by Djm-leighpark is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/?ref=openverse.