A leading parliamentary critic of the big six has urged Theresa May to resist pressure to perform a U-turn on her party’s manifesto pledge to cap energy prices.
In the wake of last week’s election, which saw her party returned as the largest in the House of Commons but without a majority, the prime minister has reportedly come under pressure from senior Conservatives to drop chunks of the manifesto.
The most intense focus has been on the more interventionist aspects of the manifesto, like energy price curbs.
This pledge in particular was closely associated with Nick Timothy, May’s former joint chief of staff, who resigned following the election on Saturday. His influence was felt by many party members to be at odds with the Conservative’s taditionall free market ideology.
A Conservative parliamentary source told Utility Week in the run up to the election that the Tory manifesto pledge to extend safeguards to ‘more’ customers, had been crafted in a bid to bridge ideological differences within the party.
But John Penrose MP, who co-sponsored a House of Commons debate into rising energy bills before the dissolution of parliament, has written in The Guardian that the energy bills pledge was a genuinely popular policy.
“Whatever the problems and criticisms levelled at the Conservative party’s election campaign, we got one thing absolutely right: the energy price cap. Wherever I went and whoever’s doorstep I was on, it was popular.”
He continued: “All parties, including Labour and the DUP, agreed in their manifestos that we need an energy price cap to stop this sort of behaviour. The 30 or so challenger energy companies that are snapping at the big six agree, and have been clamouring for a relative price cap for some time. I think we should listen to them. Let’s ignore the big six and deliver on our promises.”
Penrose himself, has championed the creation of a relative price cap that would peg energy bills to within a few percentage points of the lowest on offer in the market.
Labour leapt on rumours that a U-turn on price regulation may be coming. Shadow business secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey said: “If correct, this is potentially another stunning U-turn from a weak and wobbly prime minister.
“Theresa May unequivocally guaranteed a price cap before the general election but now it appears she is preparing to row back on that promise. It now looks like this price cap was simply an election gimmick and that the Conservatives were never serious about taking action to keep energy bills down.”
Long-Bailey concluded: “Britain needs a serious and long term approach in order to bring energy costs down, not cheap gimmicks that may simply be thrown into the bin just a week after the general election.”