Helm Talks - energy climate infrastructure & more

The privatisation casualties are starting to stack up – earlier failures included Railtrack, and more recently there is Thames Water. Royal Mail is struggling to deliver the post; Bulb and over half the energy supply companies failed; and BT is struggling to find a way forward. Is there a trend behind this, and what does it mean for the UK’s core infrastructures? As real intere

The Labour Party, like the Conservatives, has committed to borrow only to invest, to fund current spending only from current income, and to get debt as a percentage of GDP down. As ever when it comes to fiscal rules, the devil is in the detail, and these rules are less than they seem. Labour acknowledges that this may take some time, but its promise is that it will meet its fiscal

What is to be done about the UK’s failing utilities? The current back-stop is special administration, opening up the possibility of wider restructuring. In all cases it is the structure that needs to change if there is to be a stable investment framework for the next couple of decades. In the case of Thames Water, if the special administer is called in, the assets could be taken

Iron fiscal rules that allow borrowing only for investment might seem like a sensible strategy, but the figures have repeatedly been fiddled to make the UK appear fiscally responsible. Both main political parties have been playing this game for forty years. From Thatcher onwards, Conservatives used privatisation and PFIs (private finance initiatives) to move debt off the public boo

When it comes to addressing the trilemma of energy policy in the UK (net zero, energy security and customer affordability), there are three overall policy approaches. “Policy option 1” is about setting targets: pick a year by when net zero is to be achieved, and then do whatever is necessary to get there. “Policy option 2” is the other way around, looking at what can be aff

Network Rail, Royal Mail, and Thames Water are all examples of serious failure, with major economic and social consequences. None has lived up to the ambitions of privatisation, nor are they world-leading examples of efficient management or in good shape to deal with the challenges in their sectors. They demonstrate what has gone wrong with the implementation of privatisation. And

Our politicians may claim that the UK is on its way to net zero electricity, but the potential closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery provides an illustration of why the seemingly good numbers are not quite what they appear. Closing Grangemouth would bring down UK carbon emissions, but this just means a shift in the numbers from territorial to overseas production. To tackle the UK

The political consensus about how the UK will achieve net zero by 2035 is remarkable, centred as it on the assumption that consumer bills must not go up and that instead we will need to borrow from the private sector – from foreigners and future generations. This is built on the further premise that it will all be cheap, and that renewables are a lot cheaper than fossil fuels. Bu

It’s time for climate realism. The political rhetoric of low costs and ever-falling energy bills has inevitably collided with the reality of the actual costs of the transition. Renewables might be zero marginal cost, but this ignores not only the fixed and sunk costs, but also the intermittency problem and the need for subsidies and the associated back-up for a long time to come.

The Treasury gets accused of not spending enough on school roofs, on health to cut the waiting lists, on local government and social care, on subsidising battery factories and steel plants, and these are corralled together to blame it for the deep structural problems in the British economy. But are these really the Treasury’s fault? There may be issues with how the Treasury funct