Labour’s energy policies are popular, but concerns around energy costs are growing again

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.