There’s a lot of speculation about what rocks John Healey’s boat, as our new Chancellor of the Exchequer. I can tell you, with absolute certainty, one rather important thing that doesn’t: energy efficiency and sustainable energy in general.
When I stepped down as Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission in 2009, I was asked by a good friend how I rated various ministers in the Gordon Brown Government. He later wrote: “when asked which Labour minister he felt least sympathetic to a sustainable future, Jonathon was unequivocal in naming John Healey”.
That good friend was Andrew Warren, then (and still today!) the most effective advocate for energy efficiency in the UK. He’d unearthed a disgracefully ignorant and arbitrary decision by John Healey – then Minister for Building Regulations in the Community and Local Government Department in June 2009. It was all about a consultation process on what were referred to then as ‘consequential improvements’– a requirement for homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their property whenever an extension was being undertaken. An Economic Impact Assessment of this measure demonstrated that it would have resulted in a net benefit of £705 million.
This was Andrew’s account of Healey’s ‘wilful perversity’ in meddling with this consultation process, just two weeks after he’d become a Minister:
“He gave instructions to his civil servants not just to remove any question concerning ‘consequential improvements’ from the consultation document…. but to cut out any reference to the cost benefit analysis undertaken of this option’s viability, despite it having been endorsed by the rest of the Cabinet”.
Healey will have long since forgotten this. Arrogant politicians of his ilk move on effortlessly to the next opportunity to underperform.
And I can pretty much guarantee that Healey will be just as unresponsive to Andrew’s expertise today as he was back in 2010. Which is a real shame, as he’s just written another column for Energy in Buildings and Industry (which he’s been doing for decades, enlightening experts and non-experts over all those years).
Here’s the gist of that column – but you can read the whole piece for yourself – just to show what Healey’s missing out on.
Commending the UK’s success in decarbonising our electricity supply (with the percentage of fossil fuel generation declining from 92% in 1996 to around 33% today), Andrew reminds us that we’re using so much less energy now than we did – a drop of 24% over the last 20 years.
At that time (2005), official government forecasts were projecting a huge increase in energy consumption – of 25% by today (‘a quite stupendous forecasting error – almost 50% wrong!’).
Ed Miliband was Secretary of State at the Department of Energy and Climate Change at that time. And he was Secretary of State at its successor (Department of Energy Security and Net Zero) until a few weeks ago. Sadly, he clearly learned nothing about the utterly useless forecasting skills of his senior civil servants, who are still hard at work today projecting equally massive increases in consumption over the next 20 years!
According to Energy Department Deputy Director Will Lochhead, from now on they believe demand will rise by 10% every year to 2030, by 50% by 2035 and over 100% by 2050.
Twas ever thus. Energy policy in the UK is dominated by supply-side companies (fossil fuels, nuclear, renewables) who keep those civil servants exactly where they want them: ignoring almost all demand side opportunities for improving the productivity of the economy.
How should we describe this? Corruption? Inertia? Stupidity? Or just bog-standard ‘ Path Dependency’ – with past decisions forever constraining decisions about the future.
All of the above, I suspect. And all of us lose out as a result.
Jonathon Porritt 4 August 2026
