WHAT can the next Prime Minister expect on day one…
As the energy price cap goes up to £3,549 we await the next Conservative leader to take office on Monday. It feels like they will face a perfect storm. With the Royal Mail, barristers, train, and bus drivers, and possibly even nurses and the civil service and more on strike, the new PM is going to need to move quickly.
Not to mention the crises of staffing and pay at the NHS, the lack of dentists, a crisis in social care, and local authorities like Devon County Council running out of reserves – facing bankruptcy as austerity policies continue to choke off their funding – there is a lot to be done.
But how will the new Prime Minister fix all these things, let alone the climate crisis, drought, water leaks and sewage overflows?
And of course, war in Ukraine and the rebuilding of the UK’s trading, economic, diplomatic, and strategic relationships across the world after having exited the EU.
There can be little doubt that we need some significant changes.
The energy market has been broken by the war in Ukraine and the Russian use of gas and oil prices as a weapon. How can we continue to allow the price of renewable energy to be set by the price of gas?
Energy prices are spiralling out of control because Russia is cutting off supplies. Supply is short so the price goes up. The Government’s response is to give people money to help pay the higher prices, but that doesn’t solve the supply problem at all, it just pushes the price up even further.
We need an approach that is looking to change the way this all works not try to prop up a broken market dependant on and controlled by fossil fuel and its cost.
We need more supply of renewable energy in the system and to invest in reducing demand.
Boosting the supply of renewable energy is a clear win. It could start simply by mandating that all new buildings have solar panels on their roofs. Reducing demand is also not that difficult.
We did have carbon neutral housing standards that would have hugely improved insulation in new homes, but they were cancelled to avoid impacting house builders’ profits.
If that policy had stayed in place, many more of our houses today would already be far more energy efficient. These things will reduce demand on fossil fuels, and bring down the price of energy, to make us far less vulnerable to the aggressive Russian policies.
Sadly, we have waited until we hit a crisis. Immediate help is needed now and longer-term reform and change is also crucial. The best time to have started to change was 10 years ago, the next best time is now.
We can change things. When the banking crisis happened in 2008, the banks were bailed out with eye-watering amounts of money. In the pandemic the government has – surprisingly – partially re-nationalised the railways.
The franchise system has quietly been replaced by a scheme where the government protects the operating companies and pays them to run the railways without financial risk.
I am waiting to see if that government action will improve services or just save the train companies’ profits. With the energy crisis it looks like government plans will continue to see the energy retailers bailed out by raising the price cap – to the cost of end users.
This has been going on for a year with no recognition of the scale of the problem. Remember the energy company failures last year? And let’s not forget that businesses are paying even more, as are people off the grid and dependant on oil or bottle gas for heating. It cannot go on this way.
We have faced problems of this size and got over them before.
To do so, we need a bold and innovate leadership. One that isn’t driven by dogma and that understands the problems faced by people in their many and varied circumstances.
I have been listening to the two candidates for Prime Minister and haven’t yet heard solutions or ideas beyond tinkering with business as usual or ignoring the structural issues and just making tax cuts.
I do hope that once we have a working government in place again that they will put the needs of the country first and find solutions big enough for the problems at hand.