47: Power for People: Lobbying and Local Electricity
The Local Electricity Bill could - if enacted - open up local supply of electricity to nearby communities. Supporters claim it could bring to market some of the most affordable forms of renewable power, like onshore wind and solar. The bill has support from around 300 MPs, and is currently moving through the Westminster parliament. Fraser, Matt and Becky are joined by Power for People's Steve Shaw, to explore what the proposed change could mean, particularly for energy bills. Steve also has great tips for successful lobbying of MPs and others.
Read the bill here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ff35be80400f408900d4cf9/t/607ebb565da3f23a5b7b8082/1618918245913/Local+Electricity+Bill+2021-22+Session.pdf
Essential Reading:
Steve Shaw’s Founding article: https://powerforpeople.org.uk/blog/why-i-started-power-for-people
Episode transcript
[Intro music]
‘The number one thing I think anyone can do to help stop the climate crisis is to be democratically active because whilst we can all do our own things, which are good to do and important to do, we’re going to need government to do a lot.’
Matthew: Hello, and welcome to Local Zero with Fraser, Becky and Matt. In this episode, we’re looking at the Local Electricity Bill which would, as you might expect from the name, support communities to supply electricity to local consumers which, at the moment, really isn’t very easy.
Rebecca: The bill has attracted support from around 300 MPs and it’s currently moving through parliament. Its supporters claim that it could unlock additional benefits for communities whilst also bringing to market some of the most affordable forms of renewable power like onshore wind and solar. There are, however, wider questions about which communities stand to benefit, potentially at the expense of others who may not be able and willing to generate and supply their own power.
Fraser: So what can be done to encourage smaller, locally-focused supply while still protecting consumers’ rights? Luckily, we’re joined for this episode by Steve Shaw from Power for People.
Rebecca: Power for People have been lobbying hard to push this Local Electricity Bill forward and lobbying represents a critical part of climate action. So we consider what levers we can pull as constituents, voters and organisations to get decision-makers to take notice and move forward the things that we deeply care about.
Matthew: So really interesting stuff but before we get started properly, just our usual reminder that we’d love hearing from you and chatting with you about these issues on Twitter. So find and follow us there @LocalZeroPod and also if you have thoughts that are too long for your average tweet, email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com.
Rebecca: So team, how are we doing? It’s certainly cooler in Glasgow this week than it has been [laughter].
Matthew: I’m steadily but surely cooling down. It didn’t even reach the heady heights of 40+ degrees in Glasgow. I think we maxed out at about 35 degrees. It was enough. More than enough.
Fraser: It was too much.
Matthew: Horrible.
Fraser: It was too much. Scottish blood, Scottish skin, Scottish temperament: I’m not built to withstand it.
Matthew: Even your average Englishman, Fraser. Let me tell you, [laughter] in Scotland, I’m struggling.
Rebecca: I’ll tell you what, Fraser, [laughter] you’re looking a lot more comfortable now in your longsleeved jumper and sat in what I can only describe as a chair from the Starship Enterprise or something [laughter].
Fraser: Yes, for the listeners who don’t know, I’m currently mid-moving house just now and so I’m at my in-laws just now in Forfar in the Northeast outside Dundee. My father-in-law has a particularly lavish office setup...
Matthew: Impressive, I think, is the word.
Fraser: ...including what can only be described as a throne. It’s not an office chair. It’s a throne.
Matthew: You’ve already been told off by our producer for putting your microphone in the bottom of the first box that you packed which means that it’s completely inaccessible.
Fraser: Yeah, at the time, I thought it would give me an excuse to not have to come along and do this today but I felt guilty [laughter].
Matthew: A schoolboy error [laughter]. Anyway, so how did we find the heat? I mean we’re kind of joshing and laughing about it but there were some really, really distressing scenes. The footage that sticks in my mind was I think taken by a fireman in Dagenham. Initially, because everything was so destroyed, I thought the footage was from California with some of the horrible scenes we’ve seen there such as the town of Paradise missing from the map but the closer you looked, you saw little hatchback cars and semi-detached houses. This was suburban England which was just eviscerated by fire. I think, at that point, the penny really dropped for me that we are in the middle of this and not at the beginning of this.
Fraser: A friend of mine described it as you witnessing the apocalypse through cameraphone footage until eventually, you’re the person holding the camera. Even last summer, it was Greece and the islands there and then it was Portugal and it felt like it was edging closer but it’s here and it’s now. I think this is a big part of the conversation that we’ve been having and so much focused around our kids’ future and grandkids but there are a lot of people around the world suffering with the present just now. It’s unavoidable. It’s here. It’s happening.
Rebecca: I’ll tell you what really worries me now is... we’re talking about this and recognising the sheer devastation potential that temperatures like this are having now but what’s going to happen as we see longer stretches of time and more frequent stretches of time where we’re getting up to these temperatures or hotter temperatures? Yeah, I still think there’s part of a prevailing narrative of like, ‘Yeah, the sun’s out! Get to the beach! Let’s enjoy it.’ It worries me. I was lucky enough to be on holiday whilst this was happening and so it wasn’t like I was sitting in my office or having to work. I was also close to the beach and so that was really nice to be able to cool off but it really hit home for me actually, looking at my poor little dog. My dog is a black Cockapoo. Fraser is nodding along like you had this issue too I’m guessing. So she’s black and she just absorbs all the heat coming at her. She’s also kind of fluffy and needs a groom. We try and keep her trim but she was just panting and panting and there’s so little that you can do. We were just pouring water on the poor thing. That really brought it home to me.
Matthew: Becky, your point about folk enjoying the heat; look, we spend ten months of the year (maybe eleven in Scotland) living with this interminable rain and mildness and so I can understand that but what I found really shocking was I woke up the morning after the record heat and an Easy Jet notification on my phone popped up and said ‘Don’t want the heatwave to end? Hop on a flight to Spain.’
Rebecca: Oh god! [Laughter]
Matthew: I was just like, ‘What? [Laughter]. Are people trying to profiteer off these record-breaking temperatures?’ There’s a disconnect really from what we were seeing from the weather forecast where the weather presenters were sort of shaking their heads and saying, ‘I never thought I’d have to deliver this forecast but...’ I mean it was very odd and I think it’s probably just that bit about people adjusting really. But I want to ask you both did you experience anybody that maybe this was a shock to them and had started to change their minds or folk who you’ve felt have maybe been quite disengaged until recently and who maybe turned to you and said, ‘Oh god, this is happening now’?
Fraser: Maybe a little bit. Certainly, people were talking about it more and it seemed to be that the prevailing narrative was much more around ‘Okay, we understand that this is a climate thing now.’ It felt like a bit of an awakening to that. Whether or not that translates into sustained concern or action, I don’t know. We’ll see but it certainly felt to me like the people in my life were switching on a little more to it but maybe that’s a biased sample.
Matthew: That’s good though because awareness precedes action.
Rebecca: I have to say that despite the number of conversations I had with people about like, ‘Oh my god, isn’t it hot?’ there was very little talk about climate change in amongst that. I do wonder whether we’ve had it not as hot as this but we’ve experienced heatwaves before and I certainly think that the other more extreme events that we’ve experienced in recent years, particularly around flooding, for me, triggered more conversations around climate change than the extreme heat did.
Fraser: Mmm, that’s interesting.
Rebecca: Maybe it’s also because it’s summer and I was interacting with people that were on holiday. I had a lot of conversations about the heat but very few that then came back to that concept of ‘this is happening because of climate change.’
Matthew: The media coverage blew my mind as well. Look, we’re not afraid of bashing the odd newspaper outlet but the one that really caught my mind was the Daily Mail. The day before, I think, the record-breaking temperatures or the day of, it was basically saying, ‘Look, toughen up! Get a grip. Things get hot.’ The next day, when we had the fires, there were these headlines with regards to it being the busiest day ever for London Fire Brigade or certainly since The Blitz in the Second World War. How do those two connect together and what is the responsibility of the media to educate folk to understand what’s happening? Because at that point, if I was the average reader of that, I’d be quite confused about the situation.
Fraser: Yeah, it’s cynical and I don’t think it’s unlike the Daily Mail, necessarily. I think dissonance is built into their business model. We don’t know. We’re not on the inside of it but my impression has been there’s such a lack of sincere concern in general.
Matthew: Climate was notable from its absence really in these headlines.
Fraser: Yeah, absolutely.
Matthew: Across the board. We’re pointing at the Daily Mail here. I may stand to be corrected but I looked across the headlines that day and the only paper that had, in big bold print, was The i and iNews. Obviously, The Guardian, The Independent and others were carrying stories and climate was kind of embedded but for many of these, [laughter] it was record-breaking heat and not record-breaking climate change-induced heat. They’re two different things, Becky, because you were talking about the fact that we’ve had extreme weather before but it’s how the number of days of record-breaking heat we’ve had in the last decade far outweigh those that we’ve had in the last century.
Rebecca: They do and there is that disconnect in people’s minds I think. I would say a lot of people probably are used to being on holidays and experiencing heat like that if not here, somewhere. I look at myself and in my own mind too, I certainly connect other extreme events, whether it’s the rain and the flooding or even for me sometimes, I make the connection much more strongly if I’m stuck in a traffic jam on a motorway and I just see the smog around me. I connect that much more closely to the concept of climate change than I do the extreme heat, even though the extreme heat is clearly a massive indicator. There is that disconnect, yeah.
Fraser: Yeah, is extreme heat more kind of frogs in a pot rather than something tangible happening? It’s like a big disaster happens or something that you can see versus it’s just getting a little bit hotter than last year. It’s okay.
Matthew: It remains to be seen but this is not the last time we’ll see this. The topic for today’s pod I guess is not directly linked to this but in the context of a climate crisis but also in the context of a cost of living crisis, which just this week, we’ve heard new projections coming out from National Energy Action and that they’re expecting 8 million more fuel poor later this year, we’re looking for any solutions we can find. Today’s episode is all about local electricity supply and really, what it’s exploring is how community-generated power can supply the needs of local community consumers i.e. people in that local area. Ideally, clean power and cheap power. I know what you do and I know this is something that’s possibly of interest to you both. Spoiler: I know it is [laughter].
Rebecca: Just a teeny bit [laughter]. I think that it’s actually a really, really important topic. In fact, today, my husband came home and said, ‘Did you see the article in the paper about the price of electricity in London last week?’ Matt, I know you and your wife quite often talk about things related to your work. I don’t tend to with my husband and so for him to be bringing that up... but last week, just after the heat... so it was July 20th, there was a huge surge in electricity demand which coincided with a bottleneck on the grid. London only narrowly missed a blackout, as I’m led to understand by these articles. I’m sure we can go to our colleagues for more information on that but they paid £9,724.54 per megawatt hour which is more than 5,000% higher than the typical price of electricity [laughter]. The period over which that ran was not a huge amount of time. We’re not talking about that being the new standard price but we had to crank up the connection with Belgium and get our electricity from across the pond in order to avoid this blackout because we did not have enough power in the grid to meet the demand at that point in time. So when we’re looking at that, it just really, really brings it home how much we need to rethink where our power is coming from and what power that is.
Matthew: Absolutely, Becky, and I guess in that context, it’s about us trying to squeeze as much power out of indigenous sources as we can because we can’t necessarily rely on other countries to have that surplus all the time. Interconnectors are absolutely an integral part of an integrated and balanced European network but in this cost of living crisis and this climate crisis, we are having to look at self-sufficiency. So today’s pod is very much about that and about trying to unlock those indigenous sources and to do so in a clean way but also in a cost-effective way. In order to tell us a little bit more about this, we ought to bring our guest in.
[Music flourish]
Steve: Hi there, I’m Steve Shaw. I’m the Director of Power for People which I founded a few years ago. My background is in parliamentary campaigning for environmental causes. I’ve previously worked at other larger NGOs like Friends of the Earth.
Matthew: Welcome, Steve, to Local Zero. It’s absolutely fabulous to have you along. It would be brilliant if you could explain to our listeners, first and foremost, what Power for People is and what it does and then its connection and interest in this Local Electricity Bill.
Steve: Hi, Matt. Thanks so much for having me. We are an environmental campaigning organisation. We have two broad aims. It’s the UK where we’re focused and we’re not international. So firstly, we want to see the UK accelerating the transition to 100% renewable energy. We know it’s got to happen and it is happening in the UK and that’s a good thing but it’s just not happening fast enough. Bodies like the Committee on Climate Change, which is the parliamentary body that monitors government policy on reducing emissions, they’re absolutely clear that we are way off track in meeting the emissions reduction trajectory that we’re going to need to meet in order to do our part in helping stop the climate crisis. That’s the first thing; accelerate that transition to renewable energy. The second thing that we want to see, and this is equally as important, is that local people benefit; that communities benefit; that you and I are seeing it in our communities and we’re really seeing it tangibly. That’s absolutely vital because people aren’t going to welcome it otherwise and understandably so. Yeah, so we want to see that acceleration in the transition and people benefitting from the transition.
Rebecca: Let me just jump in there. Steve, you were talking about local people in local communities benefitting from this local action but maybe you could just explain a little bit more about what you mean by these benefits? How exactly could the Local Electricity Bill, which I guess is fundamentally what we’re talking about today, start to deliver benefits? I live in a 1900s end-of-terrace house on a street in the Southside of Glasgow. What would that actually mean to me?
Steve: So with the Local Electricity Bill, we’re trying to change the way the UK’s energy system works quite fundamentally. At the moment, you and I are all buying our electricity from a big utility but there are these community energy groups which I know you’ve covered really well previously on your show. They do fantastic things but there are very few of them really and they’re generating a very small amount of the electricity that we currently have. Their generation is about half a per cent of all UK generation at the moment. So it’s really small but the potential for them to grow in number and size is huge and that’s what we’re trying to unlock and unblock. They’ve hardly grown for six years. They did previously receive an export guarantee called the Feed-in Tariff subsidy. That’s gone. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to create a system, and this is what the bill would do if it became law, where you and I instead of buying from those big utilities, we’re buying directly from a local provider, so a community energy company or a community energy cooperative. To give you a tangible feeling of what they would be; I live in North London and there might be a North London community energy cooperative that is effectively pooling the various bits... it would probably be mainly solar around North London but it’s going to be different depending on where you live and I could be a direct customer of them. The tangible benefits locally would be things like jobs. I might know neighbours or friends in North London who actually work for this new cooperative because they’re going to need to be professionalised. They’ll have staff. Also, it’s quite possible that bills would be cheaper. They’ll offer me a cheaper tariff than the options that I’ve got from the big utilities. But then what happens as well is all of the good things that those community energy groups are currently doing, and there’s an enormous range of examples but one is... we were looking recently at Repowering Balcombe which is in Sussex. You might have covered them. They’ve provided for new refrigerators at the local foodbank and taking the revenue that they’re receiving from what they’re doing and then providing that in the community, so like a community service. There are all kinds of examples like that. So I might see that kind of thing going on in my community as well and all of it I know is happening because of this ability for local people to be buying their electricity from that local community-run initiative.
Fraser: Steve, I think you’re not going to find any resistance here about the co-benefits of a community approach and a local approach. We’re obviously in the throes of a massive cost of living crisis too and so aside from those wider social benefits, is there scope for the Local Electricity Bill to help people through the cost of living crisis? Can it knock a few quid off of your bill?
Steve: Yeah, definitely it can. One reason is that we’ve got an energy market that’s largely unchanged since it was designed in the early ‘90s when the system was privatised. It doesn’t recognise the fact that physically it’s more efficient to use electricity closer to where it’s generated. If you are, perhaps, in a rural area and you’re turning on the kettle and you can see a turbine outside the window somewhere in a field and it’s generating, you are physically using that electricity and that’s a really efficient way of using it than if it’s a turbine 100 miles away perhaps in Northern Scotland but the market rules we have don’t recognise that. With companies like Octopus, you might have heard that they say if you use wind turbines near where some of their customers are... they’re sort of trying to crowbar some kind of benefit but they’re anomalous. They’re doing it out on their own and there’s no way that you can require other big utilities to do it. What the Local Electricity Bill does is say let’s just change the market rules so that then you can directly benefit from a local, smaller provider.
Rebecca: I think this is fascinating and I’m also looking at the fact that we’ve just gone through a phase where countless smaller suppliers have gone bust in part due to the increased energy prices. You’re right, there have been a few and we’ve seen quite a few dip in and then dip out of this market; not perhaps as local as you’re talking about and often at a slightly bigger scale. Would this bill provide more secure routes for that local electricity? I have friends that have chosen to go with some of these smaller companies because of the potential benefits and because of what they believe in and the values that they hold. Now these companies have gone bust and they’ve been defaulted to very unfavourable tariffs with suppliers that they never would have chosen. Can the Local Electricity Bill help prevent that or do you still see that as being a potential issue?
Steve: We’re not trying to prevent what caused that and the way we understand why that happened is the obligations on being a licensed supplier are very substantial. Set-up costs are estimated at around £1 million at least. You need to have at least 200,000 customers as a utility to break even and to just have a chance of being financially viable. So clearly, that effort made by a handful of local authorities to set up their own energy companies that sold to customers and were licensed or some of those smaller ones that went bust, the risks they were facing were crazy. What a surprise! In fact, no expert was really surprised that a whole bunch of them went under as soon as gas prices spiked. We’re not trying to fix that problem in the market. What we do want is an ability for if you do have local generation, that’s community-owned and community-run, to be able to buy from that directly. Where you’ve got to try and square it is – hang on, those obligations are what’s creating all those big costs and risks for the big utilities and a lot of those obligations are good and they’re there for a good reason. It’s called the ‘supplier hub’ model. That’s the system we’ve currently got. We don’t want to remove those obligations because they’re good. We’re working on the exact detail of this but the way around this is it’s going to be something whereby you keep your existing larger suppliers and then they are extending out that set of things that they’re already doing like billing and all those other obligations and they’re providing an ability for the local community-run generator to then sell to local customers. We had an attempt to do this actually quite a few years back. It was called Licence Lite which is exactly the idea I’ve described. The fundamental problem with Licence Lite was there was no obligation on the big utilities to do it and so what a surprise, none of them actually did it. There were three attempts to do Licence Lite and one of them was actually the Greater London Authority which tried to do it together with Npower but they all failed. Interestingly as well, it’s still the example that the government are giving to our supporters and to MPs who are standing up and advocating in parliament for the Local Electricity Bill. It’s still what the government is saying and it’s the reason why we should all just go away and that it’s fine.
Matthew: On that, for a community generating power, as I understand it, there are four ways forward. One is to become licensed but that’s a nightmare for them because it’s bureaucratically onerous. It costs a significant amount of money and up to £1 million to actually do it. So for these small communities, that’s off the cards. Two is to be exempt from licences for which there is provision but actually, ultimately, from Nigel’s piece, you still have to align yourself with much of the licence regimes and the rules and regulations around that anyway. Three is to do Licence Lite, as you’ve said, which is kind of a fudge between licence and exemption. Four, which has become the most common, is actually partnering with a licensed supplier and is often known as white labelling. The way I often explain this to people is do you remember when Sainsbury’s offered you power, it wasn’t Sainsbury’s. They were partnering with a licensed supplier. Those are the routes available. Oh, I guess the fifth is that you just use the Smart Export Guarantee and just don’t bother with licensing and you just sell it to a licensed supplier. What you’re saying, in essence, is that isn’t enough to unlock community power and to bring it to market. So what might this bill do? What’s the other way forward?
Steve: This bill makes it possible for the community groups that have got the generation to actually sell directly to customers that are local. That’s what we want. There’s no reason this can’t be done physically or as a market mechanism. It’s not that there’s some kind of fundamental problem against it. It’s just the way the rules have been set up so far. They do it in Germany. Germany has 1,000 different companies of all sizes that sell directly to local customers; people like you and me buying in our homes. Almost all of those companies are either very, very small or they’re regional sized. They have a ‘big four’ utilities that control about 40% of their market; whereas here, we’ve got our ‘big six’ that control around about 80% of the market, so it’s completely different. I’m not saying we want to become exactly like Germany but it shows that it’s just a set of market rules. We can change these rules and that’s what the bill would do.
Matthew: Does this still involve the big licensed suppliers? I think you mentioned this before but are communities going to have to partner with licensed suppliers to sell to communities? Is this the vision because it sounds a bit like the current white labelling model? I’m trying to understand how it’s different and how that unlocks new benefits for communities because that’s integral and I think in the debates that will be raging in parliament about this, that’s the crux of the matter.
Steve: It’s similar to white labelling but it’s not white labelling. The key, as I said and I’ll reemphasise, is it’s about putting an obligation on the existing licensed suppliers to make it work. Without the obligation, it’s not going to work. We’ve thought long and hard about this. We don’t want to set up a situation where community groups that want to sell to customers are told ‘you’ve got to become a licensed supplier stand alone’ because, as we’ve just said, it doesn’t work. The obligations are too much and they’d fall over as we’ve seen with this effort by smaller companies that have tried to set up or councils that have tried to set up their own companies. They’ve all fallen over, so we don’t want that. If we’re going to stick to the ‘supplier hub’ model, as it’s called, then we obligate the existing big licensed suppliers.
Matthew: That’s crystal clear because they’re not obligated to support communities now.
Steve: They are not obligated which is the reason why not one single of the hundreds and hundreds of community energy groups that exist right now sell directly to a customer. They’ve almost all of them got a power purchase agreement which is just for the export of their generation to a big utility and we’re buying it from the big utility. Just to give the numbers for real clarity, the average pence per kilowatt hour that community groups are getting right now for the agreements is around about 3.5 I think. What do we pay as customers? It’s well upward of 20 pence per kilowatt hour. Of course, in between those two amounts, there are important things that need to be covered and paid for like the physical grid, and the wires but there’s some profit-taking too. We want to see that number close so that more groups can become viable because that’s the ultimate aim here. We want to see more community-run generation and this is the way to do it. Think of an analogy like brewing local beer whereby if you have to pay £1 million a year because that’s the set-up cost to be licensed... imagine you wanted to brew some local beer and deliver it to local pubs and cafes and you were told you had to pay £1 million a year for your delivery van because it’s using the road network. It doesn’t work. You have to be a massive company and then we would only have a handful of massive companies brewing and delivering beer but we don’t have that. We have lots of wonderful local brewing everywhere and it’s because the costs are proportionate.
Matthew: Okay, just to summarise, Steve, it’s not just an obligation on suppliers to support communities to piggyback on their licensing to deliver to communities. It’s also about having a fair floor price that’s going to be offered. I think also Nigel, in his piece, says there also needs to be a minimum term. At that point, it starts to make sense much more and I can see the market architecture in place to encourage this to happen.
Steve: Absolutely, yes. It’s exactly that.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: I want to pick up on this point of fairness. I actually am thinking back to some work that Fraser did during his PhD looking at where exactly and who has an ownership stake in local energy. Often, we see these forms of energy appearing in places where there are greater resources and where people have the means or the capacity and the finances to develop such systems. I guess if we’re very much thinking about this in terms of local community groups that are generating and selling to local people and as part and parcel of that, you’re able to reduce bills for those people, can you see a situation where there could be a negative knock-on effect for those communities where they may not have resources for one reason or another either because there’s less economic resource there or less power there? Can you see a potential downside to this is, I guess, where I’m going with it? I can see how it could work very well and empower communities and I think that that is all brilliant. I guess I’m just trying to think about that bigger picture for how this could play out across the UK more widely.
Steve: The first thing I’d emphasise on that is it’s really unfair at the moment. It’s extremely unfair at the moment. It’s far more unfair at the moment than what we’re trying to create and that’s because if you’re fortunate to live in a community where they are mainly older people with very high acumen, often retired, have a lot of spare time and they are able to get things together and get a community energy group off the group, then aren’t you lucky? Your community and maybe you directly benefit from those things that are happening in your area but because it’s such a small number at the moment, it’s incredibly unfair. There are a few communities across the country that are benefitting whilst so many could and aren’t. Now is every single community going to benefit equally and well from what we’re proposing? No, of course not [laughter]. Anyone who tries to say that is lying to you but we’re going to make it a lot better. The potential for generation is almost everywhere. Because we’re not fixing the size of what a community energy company or cooperative could be, then the potential for it to work and benefit an area would pretty much cover the entire country. Urban areas can have generation too. You could have ground source heat pumps in parks. As I say, I’m in London and there are, I think, six major underground rivers in London. There’s potential to put hydro turbines in them. It’s not just a rural thing is the point. You’ve obviously got solar on roofs of building everywhere.
Matthew: Particularly schools, Steve, and most of them sell that power through power purchase agreements at the moment. The question is what could they get if it was sold to the open market? [Laughter]
Fraser: When we did Glasgow Community Energy, that’s exactly what we do. It’s PPAs on schools. When we did heavy, extensive community engagement, the main question we got at just about every session was, ‘Why can’t we buy this power? Why are we not able to access this as members of the local community who can see this stuff set up there?’ That is working in more deprived communities and trying to do the redistribution thing. Now this is accepting that I’m fully behind it and I can see how it unlocks the big hole in community energy finance that we, and Matt especially, have been digging into for a couple of years now, Steve, but the question I have I guess is – not to put more work on your shoulders – is this part of a bigger picture thing? Is there more that we need to do to support communities to get this off the ground and to help community energy groups professionalise a bit more? This unlocks a lot of what we need to do but is there more needed to support communities in local areas to actually get their energy projects off the ground in the first instance?
Steve: I’m sure there is more. One thing that is beyond the scope of what we’re trying to do and not in the bill, and I don’t think it belongs in the bill, is that where you see this really working well is where the local authority is working really well with the community energy group. The example I often give is Plymouth Energy Community. They’re often highlighted as this shining, bright example where the council and the group have really worked well together and are just cooperating [laughter]. We have chosen a specific and what we think will be a very effective solution to what we say is perhaps the biggest of all the problems which is they can’t sell directly to local people. Doing that makes it financial viable. Once it’s financially viable, if you trust enterprise and trust people’s initiative and ability to be enterprising, then it will flourish. I think you can be very confident about that. I gave the brewing example before and the explosion of brewing local beer and enterprise because it’s financially viable. Where it’s financially viable to do it, it springs up everywhere.
Matthew: Yeah, and I think there’s something powerful and symbolic about being able to buy power from an asset that you can see which is community-owned and I do personally think that it will encourage the market through that means as well. Steve, I want to ask you... you’ve done this before and we’ll talk a little bit more about your background in terms of lobbying for legislative change but what does success look like for you with regards to this Local Electricity Bill and what might be the route to that success? Many of us, Becky, Fraser and I, are probably not especially au fait with that legislative process, well not the nitty-gritty of it, and maybe our listeners too, so what does that look like? What’s going to keep you busy over the next year or so?
Steve: With this specifically, we initially drafted the Local Electricity Bill ourselves and it got introduced as what’s called a Private Members’ Bill which is where a backbench MP can put it down. That’s one method. That’s one kind of route to see legislation made. The other route is where the government introduce the legislation themselves and as a sort of subsection of that, the government could be introducing legislation that’s similar to what you’re trying to get through, you can amend that legislation and then it goes through that way. That is what we’re actually presented with as probably the best option we have because right now, the government’s Energy Bill is proceeding through parliament. It started a couple of weeks back in the House of Lords. It’s a very big bill with hundreds of pages and lots and lots of parts of the energy system covered in it and it’s an ideal vehicle for us to effectively amend what we’ve drafted into that. The only way it ultimately works, in any of those forms that I’ve just mentioned, is you need the government to support the legislation. We’ve got a cross-party group of 310 MPs now that are backing what we’re calling for. As I say, it’s a cross-party group and it’s a very strong group. There are 120 Conservative MPs amongst them and also the Labour frontbench has supported it, so effectively, probably we could count on all of the Labour Party which is actually a lot more than that 310 MPs. So really, we’re looking at a parliamentary majority but as of yet, the government have not said that they back this. They say that they support the aims of the bill. Basically, they like the principle concept but you’ve got to get them on the detail. We’ve got to agree on the detail and as we’ve been discussing, what we think needs to be an obligation on the licensed suppliers to make it happen. Now if the government come back to us as part of a negotiation and say, ‘Look, we think there’s another way this could work,’ and they suggest a different mechanism and that genuinely looks like it would work, then fine but whatever the mechanism, we want to see legislation on this to make sure it happens.
Fraser: Accepting that we’re in a time of, let’s say, uncertainty politically, what kind of timeline are you working to, Steve? When do you anticipate it or is it all a bit up in the air?
Steve: No, it’s not up in the air. What happens at No. 10 and who may or may not be the leader actually isn’t going to stop the fact that this Energy Bill is proceeding and will continue to proceed through parliament over the next ten months, so across this parliamentary session. A parliamentary session usually lasts about a year. That bill is going to go through and we are aiming to amend it. The first phase of that initiative has already started. At the Energy Bill’s first debate, which was actually in the House of Lords, it had what’s called its Second Reading which is slightly confusing [laughter]. The Second Reading is the first opportunity for parliamentarians to debate something. I apologise to everyone for how ridiculously opaque our parliamentary system is [laughter]. So it had its debate and we had a number of peers, so that’s baronesses, lords and a bishop even who stood up in the House of Lords and all of them said, ‘The Local Electricity Bill presents a great model. We call on the government and ask the Energy Minister will the government support an amendment to this bill that does this?’ Unfortunately, the minister did not say yes and just said the standard government line which we’ve been hearing now for 12 months and so we press on. As I’ve said, we’ve got such a huge number of MPs backing this and so when the bill comes to the House of Commons, we do have a very real chance of success.
Matthew: I know Becky’s wanting to jump in but just a very quick point here... we’ve heard the Conservative leaders and as we’re recording this, it’s ongoing and certainly, Rishi Sunak has come out against onshore wind and saying, ‘We’re going to uphold this.’ As this debate moves through parliament, surely this is going to come up. You’re talking about encouraging local generation and supply but to supply local electricity, you need generation and actually, with most community electricity generation, certainly in England, there’s lots of solar and north of the border in Scotland, there’s more hydro but wind is a big, big tool that these communities can leverage. Does that matter to the value that this bill potentially presents?
Steve: It’s certainly not as strong what we’re trying to achieve because of the fact that you can’t build onshore wind generation. It’s almost impossible to build onshore wind generation in England because of the planning blocks that currently exist and the virtual moratorium that’s to do with the way the planning rules were changed in 2015 which incidentally, is something else we campaigned on a few years back.
Matthew: I remember.
Steve: We had a big open letter signed by lots of MPs and I think we had about 40 or 50 Conservative MPs among them. We won one of the two asks which was for onshore wind to be included in the state financing and the Contracts for Difference. That was great. We got one of those two asks. We chose to focus on this community energy campaign because whilst England suffers from that virtual moratorium on wind, there are all the other kinds of generation which you can benefit from and you can see by the amount of enthusiasm that this campaign has had, I think that was the right choice. Also, who knows, maybe given the winds of change [laughter] – excuse the pun – we’re going to see onshore wind happen.
Matthew: This is UK parliament and so obviously, wind is happening through the CFDs. There’s a lot of wind in the pipeline coming into Scotland through the CFDs, so actually unlocking this could unlock serious potential in Scotland for that onshore wind. I’m going to pause there because I can see Becky’s burning request.
Rebecca: I was just thinking, yeah, you’re talking about these obligations that would be placed on the bigger energy companies. We’ve talked a lot about how the bill has been received through that parliamentary process. What’s been your interaction with those energy companies? Have they weighed in? What is the kind of broader perspective from other organisations that could also have quite a strong lobbying power?
Steve: From the utilities, Good Energy, over a year ago, publicly backed this campaign and the Local Electricity Bill and has been publicly calling on MPs to back it. Octopus has made some warm noises, shall we say. I mean they’re kind of doing it anyway a little bit and so I’m hoping that they’ll say... in fact, if anyone from Octopus is listening, it would be really great to talk to you again because I think this really does line up with what you’re doing already, so why not shine brighter and back this now? What’s also really interesting, because it’s not just the utilities that are part of the system, is our regional grid is run by six monopolies, the distribution network operators. Four of those have publicly backed the bill and they’ve lobbied MPs in their regions to back it too. That, I think, is pretty telling. If we need more network upgrades to those physical wires, they’re going to have to make them and yet they still have publicly backed this. They say they’re keen, so that’s really encouraging. Indeed, David Johnston, the lead sponsor of the bill, and myself are meeting with the two remaining operators. So hopefully, the fact they want to talk to us is going to lead to them saying yes as well.
Rebecca: Presumably, OFGEM as well is quite a big player in this too [laughter] in setting a lot of the regulations. How will they interact with this?
Steve: OFGEM are neutral on this and they need to be publicly because, of course, they can’t be seen to be trying to influence the legislation that then sets the regulation that they must do [laughter]. That’s right. No one at OFGEM has said, ‘This is a terrible idea. Stop, this won’t work.’ Nigel Cornwall, in his work with us on this, is being assisted by a number of energy system experts. One of them is Dr Jeff Hardy who was previously...
Matthew: A friend of the pod no less, Steve.
Steve: Oh, is he? Brilliant. Fantastic.
Matthew: Somebody we’ve had on a number of times.
Steve: Sorry, I haven’t listened to all of your episodes and I’m very sorry for just revealing that. Of course, with his former senior role at OFGEM, it’s very good to have him saying that this is a mechanism that will work, that this should be done and it needs to be done. That gives us confidence. What I expect is that as we go into the negotiation on the detail of the actual legislative amendment that’s going to be made and then actually becomes law in the next ten months or so, we will start to bring OFGEM officials into the room as we are having those discussions with government to make sure that they’re all either just nodding and saying, ‘Fine,’ or pointing out maybe some adjustments that need to be made because the angel is in the detail. I do wish [laughter] there was an alliteration that would work for it but there isn’t, is there? [Laughter] It is getting the detail right that makes things work, makes complex systems work and fixes problems and we want to do that.
Fraser: So I guess the next question, as we talked a little bit about timelines and about the process, is how likely is this to succeed?
Steve: I think given the numbers of support we’ve got now, those 310 supportive MPs, I think the likelihood is very good. I can’t say it’s guaranteed but earlier this year, we met with the Energy Minister, Greg Hands, and then with his officials and I believe his words that he has said to parliament; that he wants to try and see this work in some way. If, ultimately, the government just say no, we will push this to a vote on the floor of the Commons and we might win that vote. I don’t think they will want it to go that far and I don’t think it needs to go that far. I think we will end up talking, discussing, negotiating, agreeing, winning this and all shaking hands and actually seeing some success on the ground with more generation. I’ve seen it in the past. Our supporters, understandably, watch what happens and they see the government saying no over and over again and they can get disheartened. We keep telling them that we’ve worked on campaigns like this in the past where the government have said, ‘We’re not sure. Yeah, it’s a good idea but the devil is in the detail.’ There’s three of that and then suddenly, they say, ‘Actually, we totally agree. Yeah, it’s great,’ and then the legislation goes through. I’ve done it on multiple occasions on substantial pieces of legislation that have created real on-the-ground benefits, so I think there’s every reason it can happen here again. Don’t get disheartened by what you see on the news. Government isn’t this big evil beast. It’s complicated and they can be rational and they can do good things.
Matthew: I’m very happy to hear that, Steve. In that context, we like to provide our listeners with a route forward really. Many people, particularly in this record-breaking heat that we’ve had in the last couple of weeks, are concerned and wanting to make a difference. So in the context of what you do and in the context of lobbying for legislative change, what kind of lessons or tips could you offer our listeners about how they can get involved, not just with the Local Electricity Bill but also just more broadly?
Steve: We’ve only come this far with this campaign because of how fantastic community groups of all kinds, not just energy groups, and people have been in helping by signing up to our newsletter and to the campaign which we do on our website and then writing to their MP. Many of them will write again and again and not just take a fob off or a no as an answer. That is how all the big campaigns I’ve worked on in the past have succeeded. That is my number one ask to anyone listening, if you haven’t, to please sign up to this campaign which you can do on our website and then please write to your MP. What we do is we say forward any response you get to us and then we help people with replying back again. Indeed, even when MPs say, ‘I support this. It’s great,’ there’s still much more you can say and do because we need those MPs to be standing up and advocating for it in the Commons which a lot of MPs have been doing. It’s been brilliant. A lot of them, when they stand up, they say, ‘I’ve had lots of my constituents write to me on this and that’s why I’m saying this today,’ so it works. More broadly, the number one thing I think anyone can do to help stop the climate crisis is to be democratically active because whilst we can all do our own things, which are good to do and important to do, we’re going to need government to do a lot. So pushing your elected representatives on specific changes... not just a general – ‘Can you please advocate for better climate solutions?’ The problem is an MP can just say, ‘Yeah, of course I will.’ It’s when it’s specific and that’s why these campaigns are so effective because they are asking MPs to back something specific. We draft the bill for them first and I know it works... when you put your recycling out each week at the doorstep, that was the first campaign I worked on and it succeeded. It was the Household Waste Recycling Act 2003. It succeeded because lots of people were lobbying their MPs and the reaction of the government initially was, ‘No, this won’t work. You can go down to the bottle bank in the car park of the local library or supermarket and do it there. What’s the problem?’ Our recycling rates domestically were less than 10% and now they’re well over 50%. It works. We know this works. So that’s the thing to do; be democratically active.
Matthew: That is really valuable advice and something I think all of us, not just listeners but Becky, Fraser and I, can all take home and it’s about getting behind a particular movement.
[Music flourish]
Steve, we’ve run out of time but thank you so much for your insights and we wish you all the best with the Local Electricity Bill and we look forward to hearing how it all goes.
Steve: Thanks so much.
Rebecca: You’ve been listening to Local Zero and thank you so much again to our guest from this episode, Steve Shaw from Power for People. If you haven’t already, do go find and follow us @LocalZeroPod on Twitter to get involved with the discussions going on over there and feel free to email us. We’re LocalZeroPod@gmail.com. We love hearing from you and if you can, we would really, really appreciate it if you can just take a minute to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or, in fact, anywhere you get your podcasts. This really, really helps us to spread the word about the podcast and reach new listeners. So if you can do that, we’d be super, super, super grateful but until next time, thank you so much for listening and goodbye.
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