Without so much as a press release, Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) quietly published a set of statistics on international energy prices this week. Coming as they did in the wake of the announcement that the Vauxhall plant in Luton is to close as a direct consequence of Miliband’s policies, with the loss of 1,100 jobs, it’s possible he hoped that if there was no official fanfare, no one would notice them.
For the figures are simply devastating. They show that large and very large industrial users in Britain — firms such as Vauxhall, owned by Stellantis — are already paying nearly three times more for the electricity they need to operate than the average paid by their competitors in the 14 Western European EU member states. This is before any of the measures Miliband and DESNZ plan to impose to create a “net zero” power grid by 2030 have taken effect.
As of June 2024, the last month covered by the dataset, large British firms were paying 27.91 pence per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity, and those in the EU just 10.80 pence. The difference faced by smaller companies was not quite as big, but was nevertheless formidable: such British firms are having to fork out well over double the EU average.