James Kirkup James Kirkup

The energy crisis is a failure of politics

(Getty)

Many of the thorniest problems of politics come down to the same thing: timeframes. Big problems generally require solutions that take a long time to develop and implement. But the decision to do this must be made by politicians who work to much shorter timetables: news cycles measured in days and weeks, ministerial appointments that last months, and elections that are never more than a few years off.

The approaching pain of rising energy prices is a case in point. It may well be surprising and new that European wholesale gas prices rose by 800 per cent last year. It is neither surprising nor new that the UK depends for much of its heat on importing gas bought on volatile international markets. The equivalent of around half of the gas we import is burned in boilers to heat our homes.

Also not novel is the fact that we don’t have enough storage capacity to stockpile gas as a (limited) hedge against price fluctuations. A search of Hansard, for instance, shows that opposition MPs have been pressing government ministers on this issue for most of the last couple of decades.

(There lots of examples, but to pick one at random, here’s Stephen Crabb MP back in 2007: ‘Does the Minister agree that as the UK becomes steadily more reliant on imported natural gas, we will need substantially more gas storage facilities to provide a buffer against the risk of supply interruption?’

If a prime minister makes a project a priority and is prepared to throw public money at it over several years, it will have tangible results

Likewise, British homes are poorly insulated, meaning we must burn more gas to stay warm. Again, this is an issue where successive governments have failed to make enough progress, even though they all know it’s part of the long-term answer to the energy price problem.

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