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Even allowing for some recent downward trends, energy prices remain historically high.
This reflects the rapid spike in gas prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, challenges with post-Brexit energy supply chains and the inflationary impact of the economic policies of Liz Truss’s short-lived government.
Energy bills are set to rise again in October. Independently, Labour has announced that winter fuel allowances will be means-tested rather than universal (to save on government spending).
Polling by ECIU, and others, has shown that many of Labour’s newly announced energy policies are popular with the public, and have ‘cut through’. For example, about two-thirds of people polled were aware of the policy to set up ‘Great British Energy’ (a nationalised investment vehicle for supporting renewable energy developments), and a similar number (68%) said they supported it.
Two-thirds of people also reported being aware of the move to means test winter fuel payment, but on this policy, 59% opposed it.
With new YouGov data showing household energy once again topping the list of issues people are concerned about the costs of, there is a risk that (as energy prices rise once again) policies like GB Energy become (falsely) associated with the rises.
Over recent years, the British public has tended to see the war in Ukraine, energy companies and national government being behind higher energy costs.
But data also shows that voters haven’t yet been persuaded that GB Energy will save households on their energy bills, even though a central argument from Labour around the policy has been that it will cause household bills to fall.
In Climate Barometer polling carried out just after the 2024 general election, 41% thought that the effect of transitioning to renewable energy in the next five years will make the cost of living crisis worse, while 21% thought it would make it better. 18% said ‘It will not really have an effect on the cost of living’ and 21% didn’t know.
And the belief that the energy transition would hurt people’s pockets was much higher amongst Conservative and Reform voters.
So the combination of imminent energy bill rises, changes to winter fuel payments, and voters not yet seeing the benefits of polices like GB Energy represent a challenge for accurately communicating to voters the cost-saving aspects of net zero policies (with wider polling, including from the government’s attitude tracker, showing people expect net zero policies to come with a price tag).
All of this makes the perceived fairness of green policies, long understood as one of the main drivers of their support, more central than ever.
In a survey of 2000 people carried out by Opinium, on behalf of Positive Money, 75% of UK adults were concerned about the impact of climate change on the cost of heating or cooling their home, while 69% were worried about the impact of grocery prices, 54% on the price of housing or rent, 74% on electricity costs, 68% on the cost of water and 59% on transport costs.
These concerns about ‘climateflation’ show that the perceived impacts of climate change are not confined to changes in the weather (although these are becoming more noticeable to people too).
Climate Barometer data backs this up – concern about the impact of climate change on household bills was the third most common choice behind ‘harm to nature and wildlife’ and ‘suffering and hardship for the world’s poorest’.
Separate analysis investigating the cost of ‘not zero‘ (i.e. not pursuing net zero goals fast enough) by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) supports people’s concerns: households really are facing higher bills because of a lack of action on climate change. Their calculations reveal that cumulative savings of £70bn on the UK’s energy bill could have been made had investments happened over past decade.
The Positive Money report emphasises that these climate-linked costs are disproportionately felt by lower income households.