He stayed on when Prospect was formed after the merger of the EMA with the IPMS union in 2001, rising through the ranks to be elected to the top job at the union in 2012.
Utility Week meets Clancy less than a fortnight after the 9 August blackout that left hundreds of thousands of homes cut off and sparked Friday night travel chaos.
The passionate Everton FC fan is reluctant to be drawn into outlining the union’s response to Ofgem’s inquiry into the causes of the blackout. Clancy, who was re-elected to head Prospect in 2016, explains that he doesn’t want to prejudge the verdict of the engineering experts in the union’s membership.
But he agrees with the emerging consensus that the big issue raised by the event is the scale of backup generation that society wants.
“It’s woken the public up to something that they took for granted which is security of supply,” says Clancy.
That in turn raises questions about how the transmission system can be incentivised to deliver a higher level of resilience, he says: “That will have a cost, particularly in a market environment.”
But he doesn’t see eye to eye with his counterparts in the trade union movement, who seized on the outage as an opportunity to make the case for renationalisation of the grid.
“This isn’t something to play politics about,” says the law graduate, whose union is not affiliated to the Labour Party, unlike its counterparts in the energy sector.
“If you make energy policy on the basis of partisan politics, you will have a suboptimal policy: energy policy should be based on the physics and engineering.”
And Clancy parts company with his fellow union bosses by highlighting the risks involved in bringing energy back into public ownership.
“A transition to public control may be fine in terms of some of the principles but could be very, very choppy in terms of outputs and objectives.”
In particular, he worries that the drive to decarbonise the energy mix could be imperilled by a protracted row about ownership.
“If you can achieve the changes we think are necessary for the sector without miring the sector in an enormous row about appropriation of assets, that would be wise.”
Any future government seeking to decarbonise the energy system should ensure that the owners of the existing infrastructure are onside rather than becoming mired in such a row, Clancy adds.
“If you are going to have a determined shift in public policy, the way to do that is not creating an environment where the two sides are at war. A future government that believes there should be public ownership of key assets would do well to convene a conversation with the current owners of those assets about that transition.”
“To be done effectively it will require a measure of co-operation from companies.”
And while he acknowledges that executive pay is an issue, Clancy doesn’t believe it should dominate the narrative about the privatised utilities.
“Setting energy policy on the basis of rights and wrongs in the boardroom is unwise. We should be really focused on what we need to do to ensure the carbon future we want.”
But the industry shouldn’t assume that the debate about its accountability to wider society isn’t going to disappear even if Labour loses the next general election, Clancy warns.
“They would be ill advised if they think this is a problem that only exists if Labour wins an election. They are wrong, the seeds of this were laid by them ten or more years ago when the reputation of the industry was trashed.
“When you are providing a key public good in private hands the level of public accountability is magnified and that debate is not going to go away.”
Any government will have to respond to the concerns that have stoked the calls for nationalisation, particularly in the current fevered political environment. “You can’t be confident that just because you have a government of the centre right you are not going to be called to account,” Clancy says, pointing to BEIS’ vigorous reaction to the recent outage. “They were all over it. The industry would also be well advised to engage on this. Proud as we are of the industry, they have issues to address in the public’s mind, they are considered to be pricy and a bit removed from the communities they serve.”
And discontent with the privatised utilities is deep rooted, Clancy says: “If you go back to electricity privatisation in the 1990s, it was amidst a range of privatisations and nobody understood the long-term consequences of – having markets in what are staples rather than commodities.”
The doorstep supplier mis-selling scandal, which erupted nearly ten years ago, marked the turning point in the relationship between the industry and its customers, he believes. “The industry went wrong at a consumer level and was embroiled in the poor behaviour around doorstep selling and it has never recovered from that. That was a negative feature of infusing market dynamics into what is a staple product.
“In the public view the energy industry has inflated prices, now seems to have a security problem and is sometimes criticised for its speed of responses in relation to meeting agreed targets,” Clancy says, adding that MPs have been happy to fuel negative narrative surrounding the sector. “Certain politicians are happy to continue that impression of what should be a well-respected and authoritative industry.”
“Being rational we know a number of those suppliers are very low margin, extremely difficult businesses to manage, but the image and public perception is that we are being overcharged for electricity.”
The diminished respect that the industry enjoys among the general public pains Clancy though. “It’s a sad situation to see a great industry often maligned.”
The alternative to restoring public ownership is beefed up regulation, he says: “If you are going to continue with the market, the regulatory framework needs to fundamentally shift or you are going to face more calls for this to go on the public books.”
“At the very least” this means a “fundamental reconsideration” of the philosophy of economic regulation that has underpinned the way the utilities have been policed since the early 1990s.
“Price regulation assumes that people are rational economic actors but people are not necessarily economic actors, he says. He says the degree to which people want to switch, and what they regard as a reasonable level of security of supply, “is not necessarily front and central in regulatory processes”.
“In a way it’s slightly too clever,” he says, adding that few customers understand how the system works.
A broader range of social and employment objectives should be incorporated into the price control framework that governs energy networks, Clancy argues. “Energy regulation shouldn’t just be about rate of return on assets but a wider range of social objectives,” he says, adding that the main response to tightening of the price regime has been to cut back on staff.
“The general response of regulated companies has been to cut staff. There has been innovation and infusion of technology but the primary response has been to cut staff over a long period of time. That eventually comes home to roost in terms of the ability to plan and design the networks of the future.”
This focus on price is potentially short-termist and doesn’t necessarily fit the increasingly fluid nature of the smart networks that underpin an increasingly decentralised energy system. “When the industry was privatised the place to be was in big power generation. Managing those is going to be quite an exciting place to work but we are on a journey to know how you get the right people and right technology, and all of that needs to be built into price controls.
“These companies are in a war for talent like any others and the regulatory framework should take that into account. It’s much more competitive now for the best people and you are going to need the best people to develop the right solutions and the right infrastructure if you want to realise all these different goals.
“The idea that staff shortages led to outages is too simplistic but the depth and calibre of the engineering expertise in the sector should concern any regulator,” Clancy says, adding a nod to the work done on addressing the industry’s skills shortages through efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in its workforce.
But while acknowledging that the industry is taking steps to co-operate on skills, he believes it could do more: “Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not a great policy.”
More important than ownership in Clancy’s eyes is an agreement on what outcomes society wants from the energy sector. In particular, there needs to be an “honest conversation” about how to balance the issues of price, security of supply and cutting carbon.
“We need a public conversation about the outputs we want from this sector and the best way of delivering. That will mean more democratic control and more workforce influence and engagement.”
The answer, Prospect has long believed, is to create a Bank of England-style body that could set out the long-term parameters of energy policy. Such a body would have a better chance of winning over the public to what may be politically unpalatable options than either the government or energy companies.
That clarity wasn’t supplied by the plethora of consultation papers that appeared just before Boris Johnson became prime minster, he says: “The white paper hasn’t arrived we have a series of consultation documents that are piecemeal.”
But whatever the vagaries at Westminster, Prospect’s membership will continue to deliver, Clancy insists. “Our members are proud of what they do, they are proud of their skills and their companies and what they do.
“The enduring thing is that members – even though they have been in private companies for decades – believe they are delivering a public service. We are immensely proud of what they do and they manage significant risk.”