Ed Miliband is many things. Transparent is not one of them. The Energy Secretary's department has now spent months sitting on the official impact assessment of Labour's electricity market reforms — the very documents that would tell the public, in pounds and pence, what net zero is doing to their bills. He promised to publish that assessment by the end of last year. He has not.
What Got Buried
The Conservative Party have accused Miliband of burying papers showing he ditched a serious proposal for regional electricity pricing — a reform that would have cut bills in windier parts of the country — after lobbying from wind farm developers who feared it would dent their guaranteed returns. The official line is that regional pricing risked the 2030 clean power target. The translation is that the wind industry's commercial interests took priority over households' bills, and Labour decided you weren't to find that out in writing.
This is a recurring pattern. When Miliband can't win the argument on the substance, he wins it by making sure the substance never reaches the public. Last year the same department refused Freedom of Information requests on the marginal cost of green levies. The year before, it sat on documents about the carbon cost of importing wood pellets to Drax. None of this is normal government conduct. All of it is normal Miliband conduct.
Bills Are Rising. He Promised They Wouldn't.
At the 2024 election Labour promised to cut household energy bills by £300. Bills are now well over £200 higher than they were on the day Labour took office. The price cap rises again in July. The £4.5 billion of household energy debt on Ofgem's books — a record — is the inheritance Miliband has handed to families who can't keep up.
Miliband's response has been to announce a £13 billion plan for "zero bill" homes — meaning insulation, heat pumps and new windows, paid for by the taxpayer, that may or may not actually deliver lower bills. His own officials warn that better-insulated houses tend to be heated more, not less, wiping out a chunk of the projected savings. The plan is essentially: spend more money the country doesn't have, on subsidies for goods most people don't want, in order to cover up the failure of the policies you've already implemented.
The Net Zero Cost Has To Land Somewhere
Here is the honest version of net zero economics that nobody in government will say. Closing reliable generation, connecting expensive intermittent generation, building tens of thousands of miles of new grid and paying constraint payments to wind farms when the wind blows too hard — all of this costs money. That money has to come from somewhere. It comes from your electricity bill. It comes from your gas bill. It comes from your general taxation. The only question is which pocket the government picks first.
What Miliband will not say — and what his hidden impact assessment would presumably confirm — is that on current trajectories British industrial electricity prices are now roughly four times those in the United States, and that this is why our car plants, steelworks and chemical sites are quietly closing one by one. There is no green industrial revolution if you have no industry left.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would scrap the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero on day one. We'd lift the ban on new North Sea licences, reopen domestic gas storage, and treat nuclear as the baseload it is, not a political afterthought. We'd cut green levies off household bills altogether and fund what's left of legitimate climate spend out of general taxation, where it can be debated honestly.
Above all, we would publish the documents. Government by hidden spreadsheet is not government. It is the closest thing this country now has to soft authoritarianism, and it is being administered, with characteristic self-righteousness, by the man who tried to solve the cost-of-living crisis by promising us all heat pumps.