Mark Bray-Parry interview

Torrin Wilkins: Welcome to the conversation, Mark Bray-Parry. It is great to have you on. You were a Green Party activist and the Green Party parliamentary candidate in 2019 for Guildford. So it is fantastic to have you on.

Mark Bray-Parry: Thank you. It is good to be on.

Torrin Wilkins: The biggest political issue, at the moment, is the energy crisis and energy bills. This is impacted by the war in Ukraine. And Russian oil is a massive part of that. So, the first part of what I wanted to ask you is about the energy price cap. The idea behind it is to keep energy bills down to ensure that consumers are not paying extortionate amounts. But right now, they clearly are. And I read your article on why we need to help people with alternative means rather than just freezing the energy price cap. Would you be able to explain a bit about why you think that there are better ways to do it than just freezing the energy price cap?

Mark Bray-Parry: Ultimately, I think the energy price cap has been in the media almost as much as rising energy costs. It appears in every article about the costs that households are paying. It is referencing the rise in the energy cap.

Largely, I think that has driven the policy direction of particularly the opposition parties like Labour and Liberal Democrats, and also the Green Party, in targeting the price cap as a mechanism to support households. What I find quite interesting about it is, yes, it effectively works; you could freeze the cap as Labour and Liberal Democrats are proposing, or you could reduce the cap back to the pre-October 21 level as the Green Party is proposing. And yes, those savings will then be directed towards the consumer. So, it works. It does exactly what Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party wanted to do.

What is interesting is the costs associated with such a policy, as well as the knock-on effects that it would have within the market. Since mid-2021, we have seen a massive increase in the market in Europe towards renewable energy sources, wind and solar in particular, all market-driven. And that is exactly how the free market is meant to work. As it gets more expensive and prohibitively expensive, it pushes itself towards cheaper alternatives. So that is where we currently are. The Green Party has proposals on carbon taxes, for instance, with the same aim, to influence the market to move away from carbon-intensive products, particularly fossil fuels. The idea of subsidising the market price of gas to support households seems backwards, because it would neutralise market signals and reduce the urgency to accelerate away from fossil fuels toward solar and wind. We do need to support households, but can we find an alternative mechanism?

The Lib Dem proposal to freeze the energy cap is estimated to cost £42 billion. £42 billion is a lot of money. We have 27.8 million households in the UK, and we have just under 5 million of them on Universal Credit. We can afford to give every household a thousand pounds directly, which is what Liberal Democrats are saying those households are saving per year through the price cap freeze, and we can also afford, on top of that, to give an additional thousand pounds to every household on Universal Credit. And that will still leave us £10 billion short of what the Liberal Democrats are quoting as their price cap. And then the price cap only applies to households. What about businesses? That £10 billion extra that you have got left from their policy, you can then use to target businesses. Now, about 350,000 small businesses fall under small business rates relief. We could provide support of up to £10,000 per business. Again, there were 400,000 additional businesses brought under the COVID-19 rate relief. We can then support those businesses in addition. There are mechanisms where we can now support businesses as well as households, while ending up with a policy that is cheaper than freezing the price cap, which would then have no inadvertent effect on the market and the rate of acceleration away from fossil fuels. Am I surprised that Labour and Liberal Democrats did not think about this? Not really. But I am surprised the Green Party would fall into the trap of effectively subsidising gas? Absolutely. It seems like a crazy direction for people with an environmentally focused mindset to take when we have viable alternatives, such as giving money directly to households to support them.

Torrin Wilkins: Do you think it is perhaps more of a sound bite that everyone knows about the energy price cap, at least for the Green Party? It is not a physical thing, but it is something people understand and recognise. Do you also think that maybe the idea of a policy that sounded good, and that they ran with it, even if the specifics of it were not perhaps as good as directly giving people the financial support?

Mark Bray-Parry: I think yes, there is definitely an element of that. I think that the price cap has been in the press so much, and the increase in the price cap has been a real focus of articles all over the place in media reports. There was not a single media report that did not mention the price cap increase. It is one that immediately chimed with voters. It is extremely popular from a voter perspective, completely understandable, because they can see the savings directly. And there is more complexity around arguing for just giving that money directly to households, because then you have to go down the line of, “We are just giving people money.” Is that justified? It becomes more complex as something to package up and give to voters. I am sure that is largely the reason why we have gone down this price cap route, both the Green Party reacting to something that Labour and Liberal Democrats announced, but also the reason why Labour and Liberal Democrats went that direction in the first place.

Torrin Wilkins: Do you think that the Lib Dem figures show how much it would cost and how much they also think a windfall tax could raise in the end? Do you think that they are realistic figures, or do you think they are overestimated or underestimated? How accurate do you think they are?

Mark Bray-Parry: I think they are closer to the real value, and I think the Labour policy comes under £30 billion to freeze the price cap. They have also quoted just under three billion, based on TUC figures, to nationalise the energy companies, which is absurd. You are talking at least 10 times that. So I think the Liberal Democrats have got it a little bit closer. The windfall tax is very dependent on exactly how it is applied. I think you could recoup a lot of it. You will not be able to recoup all of it.

I think the Green Party has mechanisms, which I think would be in the distribution of wealth, which would be perfect in these circumstances. We have land value tax proposals. Rather than a wealth tax, we potentially go down to a land value tax instead, which I think is a lot easier to administer as a government in terms of a tax policy. But in combination with a windfall tax, we comfortably cover the money we are talking about for support packages.

The Liberal Democrats are just about there in that £42 billion or so policy. As for the quoted cost, I think it is about right.

Torrin Wilkins: Now, moving on to a more long-term solution. There have been two competing arguments. One is investment in renewable energy and effectively going towards cleaner sources of energy, and using that investment to start to bring energy prices down. And the other is North Sea oil and fracking, which is effectively going back to that previous route. And some of the arguments around North Sea oil and fracking are effectively saying that if we do not do that now, then we will push people into energy poverty, and that it is a much easier thing to do. How do we ensure that we continue investing in that renewable energy, and what are the main arguments against those people calling for a return to those days of North Sea oil and fracking?

Mark Bray-Parry: The first thing to understand is that before the price of oil went up, the viability for companies to do fracking and to extract oil in the North Sea just did not exist.

The long-term financial viability of these projects is questionable. They would require government subsidies to make them even financially viable for firms to take them up on in the first place, let alone all the complications with fracking that come about from local opposition, and they would have to run roughshod over local democracy. It is really challenging – fracking in particular is challenging to get off the ground if the government left it well alone and let the market drive it.

The government does have the option to subsidise and support directly. My question there would be that they could support fracking, but if the government subsidised fracking, they might as well invest directly in offshore wind, since the timescales are similar. There does not seem to be, to me, an obvious reason why we would have to go down the route of fracking in particular. Extraction of North Sea oil is a little bit different, but again, with the costs that we are requiring from the government, there might be a short-term gain and short-term viability financially, but after three or four years, when gas prices fall again, that viability disappears. It is much more beneficial in the long term, even medium to long-term policy for the government, if they are going to spend money and direct money towards subsidies, to direct them towards renewable energy that gives you immediate short-term gains. And probably the best way to do that is to pass the money on to local democracies, local councils, to develop government-supported cooperative approaches to energy. And they can be implemented very rapidly by local communities. I think that is largely the way to go.

The market will ultimately drive, and the Conservatives are not going to fiddle too much with the market. We know what they are all about. And the market will continue to drive towards renewables, I do not doubt that. Providing the Conservatives, and so far they have, avoid going down the route of freezing the price cap and start to adjust and subsidise that cost of gas directly, then I think we will very rapidly see companies backing large-scale renewable projects, particularly large companies that have both an energy or fuel production arm, as well as a utilities arm, things like British Gas. I think, generally speaking, the prospects of renewable energy look pretty good in the short to medium term, if the government leaves well alone. The talk of North Sea oil and fracking suggests to me that maybe they will not, but we will have to wait and see.

Torrin Wilkins: There is this balance to meet between investing in renewable energy and subsidising it if needed, and also supporting people now. And they are very difficult things, because on the one hand, there is the here-and-now problem of people who genuinely cannot afford their energy bills. And on the other hand, investing in the solution – it is an energy crisis, and the way to get out of it is to produce more energy. So, how do we balance those two? I mean, we have found policy-wise, it is very difficult because you have those immediate problems, but you also have the solution to it. If you do not fix that underlying problem, then the bills are going to go up to an extent where it will be more and more difficult for the government to help them.

Mark Bray-Parry: We have got to look at what we can do in the next six months, both through tax measures and direct support for households. The windfall tax makes perfect sense. But just bear in mind, with the talk of nationalising these utility companies, they are not the ones making large profits. So, if you nationalise a utility company, then what you are going to end up doing is the government’s going to end up paying the cost of importing gas and energy way more than what the market can afford, which means effectively the government is going to lose money. So you will nationalise them and lose money every month. So the utility companies are not the problem, but the big gas and oil giants; they have made a lot of money as this price has gone up. It is not in their control. It was not in their forecast. A windfall tax makes perfect sense.

I did not think I would ever see a business owner come out and almost green-light a windfall tax for his own company, as we have seen recently. It is the clearest example of a company effectively inviting taxation that I have ever seen. That windfall tax makes perfect sense. A windfall tax is very specific. It is about the increasing cost of gas prices. So it makes sense that the entire amount of that windfall tax is then distributed back down to households to support them during this energy crisis.

What I would not want to see is a windfall tax where we use part of it to subsidise and to support people now, and then part of it to plan with investment. We do not need to worry about that. Let us just tax them now for what their profits are now. Think about that as direct support for the households. Then, we can look at other tax policies to raise investment. I do not think these combined private-government and planned investments, things like they have done with Sizewell, are necessarily a bad thing. Passing on costs through the strike price is not necessarily an issue. For instance, the strike price agreed for Hinkley Point nuclear power station right now looks really good for consumers. When it was only a year ago, we were worrying about it being way too high. So, I do not think it is necessarily a bad way of funding it.

And it does mean that we do not have to spend a massive amount of public money right now to get these big investments into sort of low-carbon solutions. There are both solutions to support us now, and there are solutions for the medium term. I think we can separate them and fund them through various taxes. 

Torrin Wilkins: One of the big solutions that has been put forward lately with the energy crisis is nationalisation. On the left, it seems to be one of the big solutions – nationalising the main energy companies would solve most of the issues that we are having. And that seems to have been one of the messages so far – do you think that is a solution? Do you think the money can be spent on other projects? What is your view on energy nationalisation? 

Mark Bray-Parry: I will start with the ideological perspective. I absolutely support them as public services, and they should be publicly owned. There is a purely philosophical perspective that utilities, and also things like train companies and bus companies, should not be run for profit. You take a bus service, for instance, that feeds a relatively remote village – that will never make any money. That is why we see these villages become isolated because they do not have public transport. We should not have to make financial decisions as part of this provision of a service – it should be expected that these services are provided. It is the same with utility companies, it is the same with energy, and it is the same with water. We should be supplying these; these people have a right to these at a reasonable price that they can afford. And that is for the government to ensure. From an ideological perspective, it makes perfect sense to publicly own them. Do I support nationalising them right now? No, is the answer. There is a time and a place to do it. In the middle of an energy crisis is not.

Labour put the cost at £3 billion, while the Centre for Policy Studies estimated it at £55 billion. So while we do not know the exact cost, we can be certain it is not £3 billion. If you just look at the value of the companies, the Big Six energy companies that they are talking about, you cannot nationalise those with £3 billion. It will not work. You nationalise them right now. Then what you have got to do is you have lumped yourself into a position where you are now going to continually subsidise the cost to the consumers. So for the next six months, you are going to lose money. These are not profit-making utility companies, especially if you are freezing the price cap. So you are going to continue to lose money on something that you own. And you might then make money in the future, fine. But you have just wasted probably £50 billion of the public purse on doing this right now, when we can do it at a later point. So yes, nationalise the energy companies. I think that is the way to go. But right now is not the time to do it.

Torrin Wilkins: I am in Wales at the moment, and we have a very interesting setup because, of course, England has privatised utilities, Scotland is nationalised. Wales, however, has a non-profit that runs the utility companies. So, that has been suggested as another alternative model in the mix of either nationalising or privatising. Do you think that is something that has any sort of merit or any possibility of working, or do you think that in the end it comes down to the big two options?

Mark Bray-Parry: I think it does. It is an interesting model. Wales is very interesting in terms of how well connected it is with England. There are shared services between them. It is much more complicated to split things out in Wales compared to Scotland. But I think it is a model that can work.

The thing that needs to be thought about is the same as, say, rail – you can run energy providers, the suppliers for not-for-profit, but the National Grid underneath as well has to be considered. Who owns that? Then, how does the future investment work on top of that? If you nationalise everything, everything falls under public ownership, you can take the money that is raised from selling some of the energy to both businesses and households and use that to directly invest in other energy production. For example, the Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon project could have been directly funded through revenues from publicly supplied energy. But because you have that disconnect between running things through a not-for-profit organisation, you do not have those finances reinvested directly into future projects. What you do have is support for bills immediately. The bills remain low, essentially at cost, but then you lose the capacity to reinvest. So could energy bills be a little bit higher than they are right now at the cost, for instance, say two years ago, before the price caps increased?

Yes, I think they could be. I think you could squeeze them up a little bit so you can then reinvest in it. And I think that is why I would favour, in the long run, nationally owned utilities.

Torrin Wilkins: The final question I have is on nuclear power. I think it is something we have actually spoken about before this interview.  It is one of the big ones that is currently being talked about, and it is an answer to the energy crisis.

Do you think that we should invest in nuclear power now? Of course, the biggest issue is how long it will take for nuclear power to be ready. But we were having these arguments 10 years ago. Do you think it is a worthwhile investment now to put money into that?

Mark Bray-Parry: The Green Party was created off the back of anti-nuclear energy groups back in the 70s, and they have opposed every single step of the way. Sizewell B saved something like 100 million tonnes of CO₂ over the lifetime of the reactor. Yet, the Green Party opposed it at the time. We have had these arguments every single decade. Only this morning, Caroline Lucas came out and spoke about opposing the Sizewell C nuclear power plant. The arguments about time are nonsensical. We have an energy crisis as we currently stand. We know that we can deliver short-term solutions in terms of the quick delivery of wind turbines. But for instance, one of the reactors proposed at Sizewell C is equivalent to over 2,000 wind turbines. So, Sizewell alone is the equivalent of 10,000 wind turbines. What I think gets missed when we talk about renewables is the scale, because nuclear energy is so energy dense, the scale of renewable projects required to even match one nuclear power plant is astronomical. So, I think the answer to this is that in 10 years, we absolutely need nuclear, online. For starters, it is going to just replace our current nuclear fleet, and we are not even going to increase the nuclear share for that.

It is important at the same time that we look for both government and private investment into renewable projects to fill that gap. The cost argument is again one that really gets to me. Sizewell C is going to cost around 20 billion for over 60 years. So 20 billion over 60 years, 60 million homes or something, 3,200 megawatt-hours. The offshore wind projects at scale will cost roughly $10 billion over 30 years. Again, you replace that fleet after 30 years, it is a 20 billion cost. The cost of offshore wind, which is lauded as one of the cheapest ways of producing energy, actually works out per kilowatt hour as the same as Sizewell C. Then my argument becomes: it is a lot of money upfront and you split that offshore wind, but we have not even talked about battery storage costs. That 30 billion is just the cost to produce energy and use it on demand. But if we are talking about a 100 per cent renewable proposal for a model for the UK, then you need battery tech included in that cost and battery technology will be costly. So, we have not got a cost argument against nuclear, and we have not got a time delivery against nuclear, bearing in mind that the rollout of EVs, electrifying railways, and removing gas boilers in households is only going to increase the energy demand.

This criticism about waste comes from the idea that the waste is scary. I work with them daily, and that perhaps neutralises the fear factor for me individually, but some solutions are deployed all across the world for the management of nuclear waste, and it is proven to be safe. The arguments do not hold up against nuclear, and I think that is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finally came up with their report, which included the doubling of nuclear capacity. That is the group the Green Party is pushing and using as an example of expertise in what we need to do. And yet, conveniently, they miss the fact that they recommend a doubling of nuclear capacity across the globe because it is an essential component of the decarbonisation of our energy production.

Torrin Wilkins: Well, thank you so much for that very concrete answer. And thank you so much for coming on as well. It has been fantastic to talk to you.

Mark Bray-Parry: You too. Thank you very much.

Note: This interview has been edited for grammar, clarity, and flow. The original recording is the final and definitive version.