In June, the government laid draft legislation before Parliament for the Seventh Carbon Budget, committing Britain to cutting emissions by 87 percent by 2042 against 1990 levels. It is the kind of grand, round-numbered pledge that goes down well in a Westminster committee room. The trouble is that the people who applaud these targets are rarely the people who pay for them. That bill lands on ordinary households, at the meter, month after month.
Let me be clear about where I stand. Nobody sensible is against clean air, energy security or looking after the environment. The question is not whether we care about these things. The question is who carries the cost, and whether a government racing to hit symbolic targets has spared a single thought for the family struggling to heat their home.
The Bills Tell the Real Story
Ministers will point to the energy price cap falling to 1,641 pounds for a typical household between April and June, a reduction of around 117 pounds. Welcome, of course. But look closely at why it fell. Ofgem itself said the main driver was a change to policy costs announced by the Chancellor — in other words, the bill came down because the government shifted some of the green and social levies around, not because the underlying cost of the net zero programme has gone away.
Those policy costs do not vanish. They are loaded onto bills, recovered through taxation, or both. You are paying for net zero whether the line item is on your energy bill or buried in the tax you hand over every month. A price cap nudged down by reshuffling levies is not the same as energy that is genuinely getting cheaper.
Grants and Schemes Are Not a Strategy
To soften the blow, the government has rolled out the usual patchwork: a Warm Homes Plan offering grants and loans for heat pumps and insulation, and over 50 million pounds of support for low-income families who heat their homes with oil. For the households that qualify, that help is real and I do not begrudge it. But step back and look at the shape of the thing.
We are imposing costs on families through an aggressive decarbonisation timetable, then handing a portion of them back through means-tested schemes and grant applications. That is not a coherent energy policy. It is taking money out of one pocket and returning some of it to the other, while an army of administrators takes a cut in between. The honest approach would be to keep energy affordable in the first place.
Security and Common Sense First
The global picture should focus minds. Disruption to world oil markets has driven up energy and food prices and exposed how vulnerable we are when we do not control our own supply. The lesson is that Britain needs secure, affordable, home-grown energy — not a dash to distant targets that leaves families cold and the country dependent on imports and the weather.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would put affordability and energy security at the heart of policy. We would scrap the net zero targets that drive up bills and make British industry uncompetitive, and we would back reliable domestic energy — including our own gas reserves in the North Sea — to bring costs down and keep the lights on.
We would stop treating working families as an afterthought in the rush to hit a number written down in Westminster. Cheap, secure energy is the foundation of a strong economy and a warm home. A government signing the country up to decades of higher bills, then patting itself on the back for the targets, has its priorities exactly backwards.