Opinion | Boris Johnson, Prime Minister > Secure, clean and affordable British energy for the long term.

For most of the industrial age, the UK was what we now call ‘energy independent’.

The great coal fields of the North, the Midlands and South Wales heated our homes, fed the voracious boilers of Megawatt Valley and created vast volumes of town gas for municipalities across the country.

In time they were joined by a steady flow of oil and natural gas extracted from deep below the waters of the North Sea.

Yet as the years passed we drifted into dependence on foreign sources.

Sometimes this was through deliberate planning; more often it was the byproduct of policy fudges, decision-dodging and short-term thinking.

But whatever the cause, the result today is all too obvious to anyone who receives an energy bill.

Global energy costs have been rising for some time as demand soars and factories roar back into life after COVID-19; Putin’s invasion of Ukraine pushed them still higher and, ultimately, it is the consumer who ends up paying the price.

This government is already stepping in to help, with over £9 billion of help for families struggling with their bills.

But if we’re going to get prices down and keep them there for the long term, we need a flow of energy that is affordable, clean and above all secure. We need a power supply that’s made in Britain, for Britain – and that’s what this plan is all about.

We’re not going to try and turn back the clock to the days when we choked our streets and our atmosphere with filthy fumes and ever-rising levels of climate-imperilling carbon dioxide.

Instead, we’re going to take advantage of Britain’s inexhaustible resources of wind and – yes – sunshine.

We’re going to produce vastly more hydrogen, which is easy to store, ready to go whenever we need it, and is a low carbon superfuel of the future.

We’re embracing the safe, clean, affordable new generation of nuclear reactors, taking the UK back to pre-eminence in a field where we once led the world.

We’re making homes and businesses more efficient so you need to use less energy in the first place.

We’re going to work with industry to slash our way through needless and repetitive red tape so that all this can happen much more quickly. Energy companies tell me they can get an offshore wind turbine upright and generating in less than 24 hours but that it can take as much as 10 years to secure the licences and permissions required to do so.

And as even the most evangelistic environmentalist would concede that we can’t simply pull the plug on all fossil fuels overnight without the lights going out all over Europe, we’re going to make better use of the oil and gas in our own backyard by giving the energy fields of the North Sea a new lease of life.

For years, governments have dodged the big decisions on energy, but not this one.

We’ve got the ambition, we’ve got the vision – and, with this plan, we’re going to bring clean, affordable, secure power to the people for generations to come.

NB – You can see the HM Government British Energy Security Strategy here.

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