A lot can happen in four years. In 2019, when I was recruited by the Board of Energy UK to be CEO, the main mission was to reshape the Association to deal with the new energy age.
Energy UK was formed around a decade previously, with a merger of the old trade bodies for retail and electricity generation. The old Association was structured to represent this market, but in an age where Members had diversified their businesses, challengers had come into the market, and the rapid acceleration of electrification and low carbon technologies, the Board wanted the Association to reflect the future, and to be able to take impactful, evidence positions for the whole market.

In 2019 politics, Theresa May’s Government had collapsed over trying to get an agreement on Brexit and at the start of 2020, the new Johnson Government’s agenda meant a focus on ‘levelling up’ for the still-new Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), and the environment, and ongoing negotiations on the European Trade and Cooperation Agreement – where energy integration had been political, held out against things like fishing rights.
Key issues included how to get the BEIS team to focus energy retail away from a focus on switching, in a supplier market we weren’t sure was sustainable; and continuing to build on progress on electricity decarbonisation. Prime Minister Johnson committed to building 50 GW of offshore wind by 2030, a programme of new nuclear stations, and an electric vehicles mandate.
The plan in 2019 was therefore to professionalise the Association (sorting out Governance, building our Membership, stabilising the finances); make our advocacy powerful (giving the Association a stronger voice, making sure our Membership working groups and committees delivered strong and evidenced positions); and give Energy UK – the voice of the energy sector – the ability to speak in a way that was right for the time (adding new advocacy expertise, setting out clear long-term Missions for the staff and Members, and prioritising media and online presence).
We did end up doing a lot of what we set out to do, particularly with regard to the way the team works at Energy UK and the strength of our voice and policy positions, which we know are taken seriously in Government.
Since 2019, Energy UK analysis on the UK’s renewables auctions, on inward investment, and on vulnerability and additional customer support, have made it into Ministerial Red Boxes. We have been regularly quoted in Hansard, including by Prime Ministers, and sat with more than one Chancellor to talk through energy policy. Our briefings on the gas transition, or energy bills, or Net Zero, make it to Parliamentary offices and into newsletters for policymakers.
We are very proud of the quality of expertise on the Secretariat and the work we produce (you can track our progress on policy making with the current Government in our “Mission Possible” tracker). The team has also worked to be more collaborative with colleagues across the policy making world, dragging in expertise from think tanks, charities, other trade bodies, business, government and our own independent industry programmes like the Vulnerability Commitment which more than 95% of the retail market are now signed up to.
However, the elephant in the room is that – like most of our customers and the rest of the economy – there was no plan in the world that could prepare the Association for the global pandemic, and then a once in a generation energy crisis, followed by political turmoil in the UK. The late Audrey Gallacher OBE, who had stepped up to lead the Association on my maternity leave, spent much of early 2020 working with colleagues from across business along with the Cabinet Office and BEIS, to work out how to keep the lights on with essential workers, how to get services to vulnerable people, and how to keep the economy running with the massive demand swings in energy as the population moved to work from home.

And then, as the economy was beginning to open again, came the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On the back of gas markets which were already volatile after the pandemic and with strange global weather going into the winter of 2021, the Russian invasion sent gas prices rocketing. From August – December 2021, around four million households in the UK saw their energy company go bust. There was a demand swing of around 12% in Europe, as countries moved to reduce their dependence on Russian gas, and the UK spent around £40 billion on subsiding energy bills.
The gas crisis period has caused political instability, as the economy suffered. From 2019, the Association have worked with six energy secretaries, four prime ministers, and dealt with a department named two different things. We have all learned that energy is the heart of the economy, with each 10% rise in energy bills during the crisis mapping onto a 1% rise in inflation. Tomatoes on British supermarkets cost 40% more by the end of the gas crisis as the price of fertilisers and heating greenhouses shot up.
Energy UK’s role suddenly become very visible – as the voice of the sector at a time of crisis, explaining to the public and policymakers some of the solutions to UK dependence on gas and record-high bills, and trying to highlight issues being faced by the industry and our customers. We have covered almost every major political and news programme, from Question Time and Panorama to podcasts like Newsagents, Newscast and appear regularly on the Today programme. We believe this has really mattered for the industry, and for customers who have needed to understand what’s going on. The Association also worked with community groups and charities to get additional support and communications out to the public in 2022 and 2023 – and again this year.
We have worked on everything from the new code of practice around prepayment meters, to overturning the onshore wind ban, to the design of the energy bill support schemes both in the pandemic and the gas crisis. Energy UK staff have taken calls at urgent moments from the most senior people in government before major policy decisions. We have spent our time making relationships with the other major economic sector trade bodies – like hospitality or manufacturing – so that our work on grid, planning, skills, and energy prices now reaches our non-domestic customers and the Department for Business. The Association now has a specialist in business decarbonisation in the policy team, and an analytics team that produced a series of reports on inward investment into clean energy technologies, that were quoted by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.
Lastly, looking back at what the last five years have meant to Energy UK, it is impossible not to mention that we have also dealt with the unimaginable challenge of losing Audrey Gallacher OBE in 2022, and that her death came shortly before Emma’s second maternity leave, and in the middle of the energy crisis. All of us who were here in that period are grateful for the support we received from all those who loved Audrey, and to Siobhan Kenny MBE, who joined us specially to help manage EUK though a really difficult and emotional period. We are so proud that the job adverts have now gone out for a training role in industry, hosted by the Regulator, Citizen’s Advice, and Energy UK, for someone from a non-university background, and that the Young Energy Professionals Awards now have an award, both in her memory. We would, of course, rather still have her around to drag the team to the pub or swear at Government announcements – both of which we regularly still do, in her honour.