The timing is “tight” to have a household energy price cap in place by the winter, the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) department’s top civil servant has admitted.
Alex Chisholm, permanent secretary at the department told the BEIS select committee yesterday (21 February) the government is committed to introducing the cap on standard variable and other default household energy tariffs “ideally before the winter”.
“Our wish as a department is that it should be in place by winter. It will be quite tight to have it in place by the end of this year, but it is our intention,” he said.
In a wide-ranging question and answer session covering the work of the BEIS department, Chisholm also said there was “no question” that the government could introduce its own UK-only emissions trading system once Britain has left the EU but it would have to establish the relationship with the EU’s wider scheme before it did so.
And he told the committee the clean growth strategy was one of the department’s equal top three priorities alongside the industrial strategy and Brexit.
He also rejected a suggestion the incorporation of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) into BEIS meant there was less ministerial focus on energy issues.
The permanent secretary said three of BEIS’ ministers are involved in energy, which had become “mainstreamed” into the department’s wider work on industrial strategy.
More widely, Chisholm said there was no trade-off between growth and tackling climate change.
“That particular choice is no longer in evidence,” he said.
Pointing to recent research showing the UK has succeeded in both growing faster and cutting carbon emissions than any other G7 country since 1990, he said: “This shows that that trade-off, which would be difficult to make, does not really exist.”
But Chisholm accepted the timing of the government’s publication of its proposals on sharing vulnerable customers’ data “could have been better”.
Committee member and Conservative MP Stephen Kerr accused BEIS of “pre-empting” the committee by publishing its plans to allow the Department of Work and Pensions to share information identifying vulnerable customers with energy suppliers last Monday (12 February).
This was one day before the embargoed publication of the committee’s own report on the draft energy bill in which it recommended steps to improve data sharing.