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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Business
Nils Pratley

Labour is trumpeting its Great British Energy plan – but where’s the detail?

Labour leader Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves during a walkabout at UCL’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park campus in London
Labour leader Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves during a walkabout at UCL’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park campus in London on Thursday. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Keir Starmer is promising to turn from slogans to solutions, so here’s a request: can we have a few concrete details on how Great British Energy, a flagship Labour proposal to create “a publicly owned national champion in clean energy”, would operate?

The most basic unanswered question is how much capital the new company would be given on day one. Until we’re told, it’s impossible to tell if GBE would merely reassemble the old small-scale Green Investment Bank, which was launched by George Osborne for the coalition government in 2012 and sold in 2017, or pursue far more ambitious goals, which tends to be Labour’s claim.

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