Power to the People

The below stats were taken from Power to the People – our latest report on energy policy.

As Keir Starmer announced his resignation outside Downing Street this week, the typical British energy bill is about to rise to £1,862 in July, a 13% jump and the sharpest summer increase in four years. The new bill shock and a new Prime Minister will arrive together.

It is the latest reminder of an uncomfortable structural fact: Britain still heats its homes and sets its electricity price with imported gas, and every household pays for that exposure. Bills remain 35% above their pre-crisis level, 79% of people report at least one negative consequence from their energy costs over the past year, and 76% believe the economy can’t grow while energy stays expensive.

This change of leadership offer a moment to change the tune of energy policy in the UK. The question is whether it gets seized, or whether the next government inherits the same exposure, the same waste, and the same locked-out households.

Bad Vibes

The levies that fund the transition fall overwhelmingly on electricity rather than gas, a kind of reverse carbon tax that makes the cleaner fuel the dearer one. And public trust that the Government can fix any of this is split exactly down the middle: 37% trust, 37% don’t. Most people feel shut out of the debate entirely, 56% say the conversation dwells on things beyond their control, like wind farms and bill taxes, rather than on what they could do themselves.

That sense of exclusion is the most important finding in our new polling, conducted with Public First across 2,026 UK adults, because it points to the way out, and because it speaks directly to the politics now taking shape. An incoming administration that has staked its identity on returning power to people and to places will be looking for an agenda that does precisely that. Energy policy is where this new administration must start.

The Public Still Supports Net Zero

The conventional story says the consensus behind net zero has fractured. Our data tells a different one, that the public’s position isn’t fixed but astonishingly responsive to framing. Support for the 2050 target swings by up to 66 points depending on how you put it. Frame it as an unspecified cost to taxpayers and support collapses by 39 points. Frame it around lower bills, British jobs, and energy independence and it surges by 21 to 27. The swing is largest among precisely the voters Westminster writes off: Reform voters move from net negative to +43 under the bills frame; over-65s move 57 points under the independence frame.

And when we asked what “energy independence” actually means to people, the dominant answer, chosen by 49%, was supply-side and patriotic: a Britain that generates its own energy.

There is no anti-net-zero public in Britain. There is a public opposed to a transition that asks them to pay without paying them back. They reject green austerity and they embrace energy abundance. That is the design principle for everything that follows, and it points to two agendas: give power back to the market, and give power to the people.

Sweat the System We Already Own

The state will always have an indispensable role in energy, guaranteeing supply, building shared infrastructure, setting the rules. But it has met the energy challenge with a reflex to centralise: to administer where it could price, and to plan where it could enable. That reflex is slow and expensive, and nowhere is the bill more visible than curtailment.

Last year Britain paid over £1bn to switch wind farms off because the grid couldn’t carry the power they produced, with balancing costs projected to hit £4-8bn by 2030. 55% of the public had no idea this happens. Once told, 42% were angry, calling it outrageous or a scandal. They’re right to be: at the moments and places where wind is curtailed, Britain has some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, power so abundant we pay to reject it. That is a scarcity mindset applied to an abundance problem.

This is not necessarily an argument for “less state”. It is an argument for a state that builds the rails and then lets the network it already owns work harder, a public asset put to public benefit rather than left idle. Zonal pricing would have been a way to increase efficiency, but was ruled out last year. Now the new administration must pursue other ways to let the market loose, including:

1. Convene temporary curtailment markets that route would-be-wasted power to energy-intensive innovators, like carbon-neutral fuels, electric steel, data centres, vertical farming, turning a £1bn embarrassment into an industrial recruitment tool — and into good jobs in exactly the places that produce the power.
2. Auction grid connections, so scarce capacity goes to those who value it most, and the proceeds fund the wires, substations and storage we’re short of. The scarcity that makes connections valuable becomes the funding that relieves it.
3. Open “use it or lose it” thermal headroom markets, letting flexible users bid for spare capacity that already exists on the network but sits idle, unlocking latent capacity in months, without a metre of new cable.

Together these steps sweat the system Britain already owns while the system Britain needs gets built. None of it requires loosening the public grip on the grid; all of it requires using that grip better.

Power to the People

82% of people would adopt new energy technology if they could sell surplus electricity back to the grid. 35% would install plug-in solar against the 5% who own it today, a sevenfold latent demand gap. Two-thirds would buy the kit if it were sold in Lidl or IKEA. Yet only 9% are on a time-of-use tariff, one in four owns no bill-cutting technology at all, and the single biggest barrier is upfront cost (45%).

The good news is that Britain already has a £22bn EnergyTech sector built to meet exactly this demand. Cambridge’s NODI is building a plug-in battery that needs no electrician and works for renters as well as owners. Manchester’s Wondrwall is the AI layer that lets a home manage its own battery, heating and EV charging and cut bills automatically, homegrown kit, much of it built in precisely the regions a place-based government says it wants to back. The hardware is ready. The business models are clear. What’s missing is the regulatory category.

And this is where the timing matters, more now than it did a week ago. This month, DESNZ opened a consultation to legalise plug-in solar with major retailers including Amazon, B&Q and Currys lining up behind it. The consultation runs until 30 June, with decisions promised by 22 July. By then the leadership contest will be over and a new premiership barely begun: the plug-in solar decision will be one of the very first energy calls of the new era. It is an early, low-cost, high-visibility chance for the incoming administration to show that “power to the people” means something concrete. That is genuinely good news, and overdue. We welcome it.

But the draft rules stop half-way as they explicitly exclude batteries. Storage is the missing half of the product category, the bit that turns a daytime saving into round-the-clock flexibility, and the bit that matters most to the renters and flat-dwellers our polling identifies as the keenest adopters. Germany legalised the panel and dragged its feet on the battery, and its market paid for it in years of uncertainty. Britain has a chance to compress Germany’s lost decade into two years by running the steps in parallel.

Our report sets out five steps to give households the tools to cut their own bills:

1. Finish plug-in solar to a hard deadline: a legal category without certified products on shelves is a press release, not a market.
2. Legalise plug-in batteries and make storage pay: commission the safety study now, develop the product standard in parallel before grey imports define the category, and stop taxing a home battery twice on power it only stores and re-releases.
3. Give households a price worth responding to, and the data to respond: make cost-reflective, time-of-use pricing the norm rather than a niche product, complete market-wide half-hourly settlement, and legislate statutory energy data rights. It’s Open Banking, applied to the largest consumer market in the country.
4. Make the zero rate of VAT on decarbonisation tech permanent, outcomes-based and dynamic: reward the outcome (bills cut, carbon removed) rather than a static list of named products that locks out novel kit.
5. Give households a genuine choice of finance that removes the upfront cost: a property-linked 0% Home Energy Loan via the Energy Independence Bill, and third-party ownership as a co-equal route, with parity of support so subsidised debt doesn’t crowd out the energy-as-a-service model that reaches the households a loan can’t.

The Route Through

The politics of energy has curdled into a false choice, between those who treat decarbonisation as an unaffordable luxury and those who treat any mention of cost as heresy. Our polling shows the public never accepted that choice. Britons are not asking to abandon net zero. They are asking to benefit from it, in their bills and in their economy, and soon.

This is a moment of change, and moments of change do not last. A new leadership, a fresh mandate, a public ready for a different settlement, and a set of decisions already sitting in the in-tray.

It’s time to give power to the market, and power to the people. A future of energy abundance awaits. Read our full report here.