The price cap fell on 1 April. The headline figure was a £150 cut on the average bill. Predictably, ministers spent the morning on every breakfast TV sofa congratulating themselves. The reality? The government has not abolished the green levies driving up your electricity bill. It has simply moved them onto your tax bill, and only for three years. In 2029, the bills come roaring back.

The Reality Behind the £150

Read the small print. The Treasury is funding 75% of the costs of the Renewables Obligation scheme — a green levy that has sat on consumer electricity bills for two decades — for the next three years. That is how the £92 average saving on a typical electricity bill is being engineered. The other £58 of the headline £150 comes from ending Energy Company Obligation funding and sundry tweaks. None of this is a real reduction. It is an accountancy reshuffle.

And the Treasury, of course, gets its money from somewhere. From you. The same household that is "saving" £150 on its bill is paying the same £150, indirectly, in income tax and frozen thresholds. It is a magic trick — money in one pocket, out of the other — and Whitehall hopes you won't notice the sleight of hand.

What Happens in March 2029?

This is the bit ministers don't want to talk about. The funding ends in March 2029. At that point, those costs go straight back onto consumer electricity bills. Three years from now, an unsuspecting British family is going to open their April bill and discover their electricity has jumped by close to £100 overnight. Whoever is in government will then be blamed. Convenient if you are running a Labour government hoping to hold an election before the bill arrives.

This is not energy policy. It is electioneering. It is the same trick that Brown pulled with the smoothed-out brown envelope. It is the same trick the last Conservative government pulled with the Energy Price Guarantee. Short-term subsidy hides long-term cost. And the cost of net zero never actually goes away. It just gets shuffled around until somebody else has to pay it.

The Honest Conversation Britain Isn't Having

Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world. Domestic prices are not far behind. The reason is not Russian gas. It is twenty years of layered green levies, capacity payments, balancing costs and grid constraint payments — the cumulative bill for a decarbonisation programme that was never honestly costed for the public.

If we want cheaper energy, we need cheaper energy generation. That means baseload nuclear at scale. It means North Sea gas to bridge the transition. It means scrapping the absurd subsidies for intermittent generation that drive up system costs. Pretending we can hide the green levies behind the Treasury's sofa for three years and call it a "cut" is gesture politics.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would scrap the Renewables Obligation and Contracts for Difference subsidies and let the cost reductions flow through to bills permanently — not as a temporary three-year fudge. We would restart North Sea exploration. We would commission small modular nuclear reactors at industrial pace. We would withdraw from the Climate Change Act 2008's legally-binding 2050 net zero target, which has driven up costs without a serious plan to deliver. And we would tell the British public the truth about what energy actually costs.

The £150 you "saved" this April was a loan from your future self. Don't fall for the magic show. The real bill is still coming.