The decision to raise your energy bill was made in Tehran, not Westminster. When somebody closes a shipping lane or cuts a pipeline, the price of everything in Britain — heating, transport, food — moves at the speed of a futures contract. That’s £37 billion a year leaving this country — £1,320 from your household — buying a commodity whose price is set by people who don’t answer to British voters.
Three weeks ago the Climate Change Committee published the number that should end every argument about this: the entire Net Zero transition costs roughly £4 billion a year. The 2022 energy crisis alone cost £183 billion. We spent nearly fifty times the transition bill on a single crisis — and now we’re heading into another one.
This isn’t an environmental argument. It’s a sovereignty one. And here’s what we do about it — by speed, starting this week. Everything below has been done somewhere, most of it cheaply, all of it faster than waiting for the next shock.
This week — cut the dependence
Drop the motorway speed limit to 60mph — for petrol and diesel vehicles. EVs stay at 70. ANPR cameras already know which is which. This is the single fastest oil demand cut ever deployed. The US did it in 1974. The Netherlands did it in 2020. The IEA puts it as measure number one. Cars hit peak efficiency at 50mph — everything above that is burning imported fuel. The Americans saved 3,000–5,000 lives in the first year. Cost: new signs and a rolling incentive to switch.
Turn the thermostat down one degree. Every 1°C saves 8–13% on heating gas. France mandated 19°C in public buildings in 2022 and cut national gas consumption by 17%. The UK could run the same campaign by Friday.
Copy France’s 2022 playbook wholesale. Shops must close their doors when the heating’s on. No lit advertising after midnight. AC no lower than 26°C in commercial buildings. Verified 10–17% reduction in energy use in a single winter. The rules are written. Translate and gazette them.
This month — stop paying hostile prices
Those measures reduce what we burn. These ones start cutting the import bill.
Free local buses, funded from a windfall tax. Germany’s €9 monthly ticket was the most popular policy in a generation. We have 600-odd councils and half-empty bus routes. Fill them.
Mandatory food waste reporting. Agriculture runs on imported energy — natural gas for fertiliser, diesel for machinery, fuel for refrigerated transport. The UK wastes 9.5 million tonnes of food a year — 18 million tonnes of imported fuel and fertiliser spent growing, processing, and transporting it, all for the bin. France has required large businesses to report food waste since 2016. It works.
Double the rail freight grant from £20 million to £40 million a year. It already removes 900,000 lorry journeys annually — every one of them burning imported diesel. Each freight train replaces 76 lorries. The benefit-cost ratio is 3.4:1. Austria spends five times what we do and gets a 30% rail freight share. Ours is 9%.
This year — build an energy system no one can switch off
Everything above is behavioural — changing how we use energy we already have. What follows is structural — making Britain’s energy supply British.
A national insulation blitz, street by street. Insulation is the cheapest defence policy this country has ever been offered. Loft insulation costs £900 and pays for itself in three years. After that it saves you money every winter for the life of the house. UK homes lose heat three times faster than homes in Germany or Norway — not because of the weather, but because of the walls. The government’s target is 500,000 retrofits a year. The actual number last year was 42,600. That’s not a gap — it’s an absence.
Retrofit all social housing first. 45 people a day die from cold homes in this country. Councils own social housing, so there’s no consent problem. This is the fastest route to scale, and it reaches the people whose bills doubled first. Every £1 million spent on energy efficiency creates five times more jobs than the same money spent on fossil fuels.
Require 50% local sourcing in public sector catering. The UK spends £2.4 billion a year feeding schools, hospitals, prisons, and the military — much of it on imported food carried by imported fuel. France mandated 50% local under the Egalim Law. Use the same rule to redirect public money to British farms and cut the transport miles.
Mandatory energy audits for every business above 10 employees. The current scheme covers only 5,000 large enterprises. There are 250,000 businesses in the next tier down, most of which have never checked where their energy goes. This finds the heating running overnight, the compressor nobody serviced, the lighting schedule from 1997.
Decouple electricity pricing from gas. The UK generates over 40% of its electricity from renewables, but prices the lot off the most expensive generator, which is gas. British wind and solar are the cheapest power sources in the country — let them sell at their actual cost instead of being dragged up to the gas price set in Doha.
Mandate solar on car parks and commercial roofs. England alone has 200 sq km of car parks and enough commercial roof space for 117 GW of solar — more than twice peak demand. France now requires solar canopies on every car park over 1,500 square metres. The EU mandates solar on all new commercial buildings by 2026. The UK has 21 GW installed. The roofs exist. The panels are cheaper than they’ve ever been. Put them up.
Emergency fast-track planning for solar, onshore wind, and grid connections. Every month of planning delay is another month of household bills tethered to gas prices set in Qatar.
Stop subsidising the countries we’re trying to be independent from
The UK spends £17.5 billion a year subsidising fossil fuels. That’s four times the entire annual cost of the Net Zero transition. We are taxing British households to keep them dependent on foreign energy. Roughly £625 per household, paid through taxes, to prop up the industry that’s charging you £2,400 a year in energy bills. Redirect it.
Your retirement savings are invested in the same companies that just raised your energy bill. UK pension funds hold £88 billion in fossil fuel investments. France has required climate risk reporting for investors since 2015. Require disclosure and phase-down — this is regulatory, not fiscal. It costs the Treasury nothing and it stops British retirement savings from betting against British energy independence.
For context on what we choose to spend: the Iraq war cost Britain £9.24 billion over eight years, partly to secure oil supply routes. That same money would have bought 1.85 million heat pumps.
The return on independence
The CCC modelled what happens if another price spike hits in 2040. In a UK still hooked on foreign gas, your bills jump 59%. In a UK that owns its energy, they rise 4%. That’s the difference between another crisis and a bad week.
Every pound spent on the transition returns between £2.20 and £4.10 — in warmer homes, cleaner air, fewer asthma admissions, and an energy system that doesn’t collapse every time a shipping lane closes. Air pollution alone currently costs the UK between £27 billion and £50 billion a year.
That £37 billion currently leaving the country to buy foreign fuel? It could be paying British wages — building the turbines, fitting the insulation, manufacturing the heat pumps. Green energy investment already creates three times more jobs per million pounds than fossil fuels.
The obvious question is why none of this happened already. The short answer is that the economics used to be weaker — but only because nobody had yet invested at scale. Germany paid above-market rates for solar in 2005. Denmark built offshore wind when it was expensive. China scaled the manufacturing. Between them they drove the cost of renewables below fossil fuels, which is where it has been since roughly 2020. The UK mostly watched. The result is that we now have access to the cheapest energy technology in history without having paid for the R&D — and we’re still not deploying it fast enough, partly because every government kicks the infrastructure upgrade to the next one, and partly because the industry that stands to lose has been spending to slow things down. None of this is mysterious. The question is whether this crisis is finally expensive enough — or politically obvious enough — to break the pattern.
Every intervention on this list has been tested, costed, and deployed in a country we can visit by train. The technology exists. The precedents are there.
Britain can keep sending £37 billion a year to countries that set the price by closing a strait, or it can spend a ninth of that building an energy system it actually owns.