Amid the alarming mix of idealism and drift that characterises British energy policy, readers of a pragmatic bent will be reassured to learn that an industry stalwart has been appointed chief executive of one of the most important statutory bodies on the subject. 

Having previously served as Chief Executive of Energy UK, the sector’s trade association, Emma Pinchbeck might be expected to bring a sober, commercial perspective to her leadership of the Climate Change Committee, in its critical role of advising the government on emissions targets. 

However, a closer look at Energy UK’s output over recent years might suggest that the major players in the sector itself are all rather too relaxed about the trajectory of energy policy in the UK. Despite concerns about Britain’s ability to meet existing levels of demand for domestic and commercial electricity, they are apparently excited about the burden of both heating and road traffic being shifted on to grid-based power sources in the near future. This tone seems quite surprising from the energy trade association of a country that has already seen an exodus of industries due to some of the highest wholesale prices in the world, and which is now facing an acute energy security crisis. 

What point in the future would be a realistic target for delivering a stable energy mix that does not include fossil fuel sources? If you were to ask a senior executive or engineer at one of Britain’s major suppliers, it would be astonishing if they didn’t offer a date substantially further in the future than six years’ time, which is Labour’s objective. Yet rather than sounding a note of caution, Energy UK’s “Mission Possible” report, which was published only days after the new government won office, positively eggs the government on, boasting that Britain is poised to become “a clean energy superpower”. Is this really a balanced snapshot of the range of perspective of an industry responsible for offering stable, affordable power to a country of seventy million people from a variety of sources? 

British industry has become very poor in general at projecting its own voice confidently in public

It’s unfair to pick on Energy UK as if it’s a solitary example here. Whilst the energy sector is probably one of the worst cases, the truth is that British industry has become very poor in general at projecting its own voice confidently in public when it comes to controversial policy matters. When it comes to defending their own interests or those of their consumers, it seems that those who speak on behalf of British business feel obliged to ignore or minimise cases when the law or regulations have forced them to do certain things that might be unpopular with the public. 

One of the most glaring examples of public communications failure by any industry in recent years has been the water sector, where a pernicious myth was allowed to take hold that English seas and waterways were suddenly and uniquely being flooded with raw sewage. This was a result of data suddenly becoming available from a hugely increased number of sites across the country — data sources grew nearly twenty-fold between 2016 and 2023 — reporting the occasions when the wastewater system overflowed into other waterways. Environmental activists and opponents of privatisation jumped onto the new data to spread the idea (which many of them no doubt believed) that the water companies had suddenly increased the amount of untreated wastewater that was finding its way into the nation’s rivers and reservoirs. This campaign was so successful that at one point, it appeared to have several Tory cabinet ministers taken in. 

Rather than take urgent steps to correct the record and restore public trust, the water industry’s representative bodies and spokesmen remained silent on the subject of the increased monitoring, and instead focussed on vague-sounding plans to upgrade Victorian sewage infrastructure in the medium to long term. Clearly, this was not sufficient for the unduly alarmed public, and a full-on moral panic threatened to break out. Fortunately, the change of government has calmed the media’s nerves — no thanks to the industry itself, which left the task of defending its reputation to a near single-handed effort by the independent commentator Steve Loftus. 

This nonsense could quite easily have led to the sector being dumped with many tens, possibly hundreds of billions of pounds of unnecessary liabilities to hermetically seal off the wastewater network. Capital would have divested itself; the privatised utilities would have gone bankrupt and, knowing how the Treasury operates, it’s likely that the already insolvent local authorities would have been landed with the costs. In that scenario, we could quite easily have ended up as a country lacking reliable national potable water provision. So why didn’t the sector speak up for itself? 

Another bizarre example of an industry remaining tight-lipped as severe regulatory intrusions alienated their customers is the sugar tax and food reformulation story, doggedly followed by Christopher Snowdon of the IEA (and a regular Critic contributor). Between 2017 and 2019, a number of the country’s most famous soft drinks producers, including Suntory and AG Barr, either removed or significantly reduced the sugar content of their products, in anticipation of the new Sugar Tax. This change was immediately noticed by consumers of products such as Lucozade, Ribena and Irn Bru, causing sales to plummet, accompanied by acrimonious commentary on social media. However, the companies seemed desperate to justify the change as being driven by popular demand — which it clearly wasn’t, given that sales were collapsing. Anything, rather than blame the new Sugar Tax. 

Similarly, under a strategy initially floated by Public Health England in 2015 and launched in 2018, companies were “voluntold” (it was made clear that the target would become compulsory if companies didn’t sign up to it) to reduce the amount of sugar by 20 per cent across a huge range of food products by 2024. Either they would have to replace the sugar with the same artificial sweeteners that had put consumers off the soft drinks, or they could simply reduce the size of their products. 

It’s little surprise that the term “shrinkflation” has become common currency in the UK over the period since food manufacturers began trialling solutions that would allow them to hit the ambitious target. In fact, some of the media outlets that have been the keenest on mandatory sugar reduction such as the BBC and the Guardian have noted the trend, which naturally they’ve attributed to profit-hungry manufacturers ripping off the hard-pressed consumer. Yet the manufacturers themselves have been all but silent on the directives that are pushing them to make these changes. 

The required reductions are clearly arbitrary, and in the case of many products, practically unworkable; they have quite clearly sprung forth from the minds of bureaucrats with minimal understanding of the technicalities of food composition or production. Furthermore, there is significant evidence that the changes, if they take effect as planned, will make more children underweight than will cease to be overweight. There are perfectly reasonable grounds on which these policies could be objected to, and the ways that they will make consumers worse off ought to be highlighted; yet the companies who dominate the sector seem to be extremely timid in doing so, at least in public. 

In some ways, it seems as if each sector is desperate to avoid becoming the tobacco industry, which became synonymous with corporate dishonesty and disregard for their consumers’ health and well-being to protect its own profitability. The industry’s attempts to overcome the emerging consensus that the habit was potentially lethal ultimately led to even greater reputational harm than the product itself. 

To understand the dynamic at play here, it’s worth returning to the energy sector. As climate change emerged as a serious area of concern in the 1990s and early 2000s, the largest energy companies realised that they had a serious public relations problem on their hands. Led first by the major oil and gas producers, these companies moved to position themselves as the inheritors of the infrastructure of earlier generations, and an important and constructive part of the dialogue about how the world would move forward. Basically, they were going to do anything to avoid playing the role of the tobacco companies; rather than become the villain of the new consensus, they would become part of it. 

To do this, they employed earnest young graduates to join their slick, well funded marketing and public affairs departments, to work on and promote the industry’s plans for the energy transition, feeding into the work being done by national governments and international organisations. Eventually, a lot of this type of work was pooled by the individual corporations into trade associations. 

It was a perceptible and at least partially successful attempt at rebranding. Certainly, by the time people of my generation were considering future career options in the late 2000s, it was common to hear that if you really wanted to do your bit to fight climate change, you should get a degree in engineering and join the energy company. Although in reality, many of those who did best out of this skipped the engineering part out, and went into policy and public affairs type jobs with their humanities degrees, often chopping and changing between advocacy work and public affairs; Ms Pinchbeck herself read Classics before going to work for World Wildlife Foundation. 

However, now that the older generation of marketers and lobbyists have mainly retired, the younger generation of true believers are in control of organisations like Energy UK, along with the public affairs departments of the main companies. In any public corporation, the individuals in charge are citizens and human beings as well as officers of the company, and it’s right and proper that they balance the interests of society and the world around them with the bottom line. However it’s quite unusual that a whole industry should have come to rely, almost by default, on a group of people who are ideologically antagonistic to quite a lot of what the industry actually does, to communicate both to the government and to the public what that industry’s best interests are. 

This pattern can be seen outside of the energy sector as well. For example, oil industry veteran and blogger Tim Newman noted the propensity of senior British executives to use their LinkedIn profiles to ostentatiously signal their support for fashionable government policies that will harm their businesses. Indeed, hectoring and moralising seems to have replaced braggadocio as the hallmark of the LinkedIn “thought leader”. 

One theory is that corporate HR departments have managed to convince boardrooms that a failure to take a demonstrably progressive line on any matter of policy will cause half of their millennial employees to walk out, or otherwise result in costly tribunals. 

Or perhaps it’s simply that companies no longer think they have the influence to shape policy, and that they’re better off backing whatever it is that they’re going to be forced to do regardless. If car companies are going to be forced to stop producing the petrol and diesel cars that their customers want, maybe they are just better off trying to appear enthusiastic about the electric vehicles they’re going to have to sell instead. Like the proverbial Wagon Wheel, perhaps it’s easier to tell people that their favourite confectionery just seems smaller than it did in their childhood because their hands are bigger now, rather than because the product’s been shrunk to meet a sugar target. 

If that is the case, though, it’s not just illustrative of the decline in power of the corporate lobby, which few will miss, but of consumers and the public themselves. The ability of the representatives of industry to influence politicians in the past came from two things (if you exclude outright corruption); firstly in demonstrating how policy might create or destroy jobs, and secondly in demonstrating how policy might impact their ability to give the public the goods and services that they wanted. But in a world in which consumers are going to get whatever it is that the policy-making class have already decided is best for them, they’re no longer a critical part of the picture. Industry and its representatives may have made a rational decision that they’re better off pandering to the tastes of the narrow section of society that really makes the decisions now.