By Chiara Ruggieri-Mitchell, FGF Research Assistant
Dear Miatta, many congratulations on your appointment as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero.
The Prime Minister’s decision to cut VAT on electricity bills has sent a clear signal of his intention to lower the burden of the cost of living for people across the country. This is a welcome start, but there is a lot more to do. So, here are three key areas that you, in your new role, can address to move the dial on clean energy delivery, reduce the cost of bills and help the country achieve its green transition targets.
1. Decoupling electricity from gas
Scrapping VAT from electricity bills will certainly bring some relief to consumers – but it addresses a symptom, not the cause itself. Our current system is significantly outdated; a hangover from when coal dominated the energy market. In 2025, although more than 50% of the UK’s electricity was generated through clean energy, gas continues to set the price due to the marginal pricing system.
In the spirit of the Prime Minister’s focus on prevention, a more radical step is needed: to decouple electricity prices from gas so that it no longer dictates consumers’ electricity bills. Unless this change is made, we will remain vulnerable to future price spikes caused by shocks in gas markets. Decoupling is not straightforward; nor are energy markets. But complexity cannot be the reason for delay when the consequences of inaction are so severe.
Contracts for Difference (CfDs) already guarantee generators a fixed price for the energy produced, but they don’t go far enough. Gas still sets the price when the energy hits the market, and suppliers pass the cost straight to customers, raising the cost of bills. There is also the ongoing need for gas when renewables fall short; solving that will take a mix of technologies, particularly large-scale battery storage, before a genuine switch away from gas becomes possible.
None of this happens without structural change. Clean energy infrastructure must be deployed faster, and energy efficiency pushed further, to keep energy consumption on its downward trajectory. At The Future Governance Forum (FGF) , we are already unpacking the barriers standing in the way of that acceleration. Through our engagement with experts, we’ve heard the same thing repeatedly: innovation funding remains too scattered to access easily. The government must mandate that retrofit grants fund the switch to low-carbon and then ask the Treasury to review why willing capital still can’t easily reach clean energy innovation, and finish the job the Public Accounts Committee recommended with a: single, clear and long-term funding plan for clean energy innovation. Scale and speed of supply are what will finally loosen gas’s grip on the marginal price. Get this right, and the reward is twofold: cheaper electricity for consumers in the long run, and a faster cut in the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change.
2. Clean power in every postcode
The Prime Minister has been clear on his commitment to deliver ‘growth in every postcode’. There is a real opportunity now for the same logic to be applied to the clean energy transition.
At FGF we’ve held workshops and interviews with clean energy experts which have highlighted a consistent issue: that an overreliance on national government is stalling local solutions that could deliver energy that is both clean and affordable. Great British Energy’s Local Power Plan is a good starting point, but it doesn’t go far enough. Right now, Local Area Energy Plans (LAEPs) only exist where a place already has the money, capacity or the will to write one. The result is that Greater Manchester and a handful of counties like Cambridgeshire have done it – but most of England hasn’t.
Local Growth Plans are now a statutory duty for every Mayoral Strategic Authority, but LAEPs still aren’t. This leaves councils at risk of being sidelined just as the Local Power Plan and the National Energy System Operator (NESO)’s Regional Energy Strategic Plans roll out. To address this, LAEPs should be made a statutory companion to the Local Growth Plans. As FGF has argued, this could help strategic authorities act as ‘stewards’ for their regions: : convening local authorities, community energy groups, networks and suppliers around a shared local plan, rather than becoming a delivery bottleneck themselves.
3. Telling a better story on clean energy
Right now, the story that clean energy is cheap energy hasn’t landed. For most people checking their bills, there’s a mismatch between what they’ve been told and what they’re seeing. This mismatch – caused in part by a political failure to accurately describe the progress being made on clean energy – has left a void where a compelling narrative on the benefits of clean energy should exist. So while the public tends to back the destination set out by the government, they don’t believe there is a clear delivery plan to make it happen.
The government should be honest about the sequencing of the transition and prioritise a clear, consistent message for the public – one that isn’t dictated by the anti-clean energy rhetoric coming from the populist right. Doing this well means asking a simple question of every decision: can the public understand why it is being made and how it benefits them?
Polling consistently suggests that a diverse coalition of voters support the transition when it is framed around energy security and long-term affordability, despite paying little attention to the arguments dominating the public debate. Against this backdrop, spending political capital trying to prove critics wrong is unlikely to persuade the audiences the government most needs to keep on side. It risks missing opportunities to reassure those people instead.
Clarity doesn’t come from just repeating the same message, though; it comes from being honest about trade-offs too. Take electrification, for example: a stronger push on heating, transport and industry means faster energy grid spend, and harder choices about who pays and who benefits. Choosing between competing priorities, spending commitments and constituencies is the harder work behind any energy strategy – something we are actively working on at FGF.
The good news for this administration is that support for renewable energy and policies to stop climate change already reaches across political divides. The challenge now is to show that the transition is not just about where the country is heading, but how each step taken today makes the country more secure, more resilient, and ultimately, better protected from the shocks that have driven up bills. This is the story the government should be telling much more clearly.
Given your experience steering the New Economics Foundation, shaping policy at the IPPR, and your role as minister responsible for energy consumers (during which you called for the Net Zero target to be accelerated), few people arrive in this job better placed to close the gaps this letter has set out. The three courses of action outlined above will help ensure you can deliver energy security, lower bills and steer the country away from fossil fuel dependency – all of which ties into the Prime Minister’s Downing Street promise to begin ’investing in people’s success, rather than paying for failure’.
None of it can or should wait – and we at FGF look forward to working with you and your new team to help turn these principles into delivery.
