Cornwall Insight, the energy consultancy most reliably correct on these forecasts, has just published its July Energy Price Cap projection. An increase of 13%, taking the typical Direct Debit household bill to £1,850 a year. Up £209 from the April cap. Up well over £750 from a decade ago in cash terms. And up by every measure compared with the promises this government made on the doorstep.

The £150 Saving That Lasted Three Months

Cast your mind back to the Autumn Budget. The Chancellor stood at the despatch box and announced a £150 reduction in the typical household energy bill, paid for by tinkering with the levies that sit on top of every meter in the country. That cut came through on 1 April. By 1 July, eleven weeks later, the cap is forecast to be £59 a year worse than it was before her intervention.

This is the entire problem with Labour's energy policy in microcosm. Headlines first, mathematics later. A short-term subsidy paid for by stretching policy costs, undone by the underlying market within a single quarter. Households get a quick photo opportunity. They then get a bigger bill.

What Actually Sits On Your Bill

Look at the line items on a typical electricity bill and you will find that wholesale energy is no longer the largest component. Network costs, policy costs and the levies funding Britain's net-zero transition together make up over a third of the bill. These costs are baked in. They rise as more renewables, more grid reinforcement and more standby capacity are layered on top of an already creaking system.

Ed Miliband's planned "Energy Independence Bill" doubles down on the same approach. More wind. More subsidy. More transmission upgrades. None of it lowers the unit cost on your bill. All of it raises the policy cost line. Independence from what, exactly? We import LNG by the tankerful and shut down our own North Sea gas in the same week.

The Strategic Insanity Of It All

Britain has gas under the North Sea and in the Bowland shale. We have uranium and the engineering heritage for nuclear. We have hydro potential in Scotland and we have one of the most advanced energy markets in the world. Yet we sit and watch our domestic supply windowed off by ministers more interested in their COP conference photographs than in industrial competitiveness.

British factories are closing because the unit cost of UK industrial electricity is now amongst the highest in the developed world. Our steel industry is on life support. Our chemicals industry is migrating. Net zero, in practice, has become "net imports". We are not decarbonising the planet. We are exporting our emissions and our jobs to whoever has the cheapest coal.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would scrap the 2050 net zero target. We would issue new North Sea oil and gas licences immediately. We would commission a new generation of small modular reactors and reopen the conversation on shale exploration. We would strip the policy levies off domestic bills entirely. The savings to a typical household run into hundreds of pounds a year — not £150 of stage-managed relief, but a sustained reduction.

The British public was sold net zero on the promise it would be cheap, popular and inevitable. None of those promises has survived contact with the meter. The July price cap is the receipt. Reform UK is the only major party in Britain willing to read it out loud.