When a poll finds that almost half of Conservative voters favour taking the energy industry into public ownership, and a former adviser to Tory governments describes the privatisation model for energy and water as broken, it seems fair to surmise that a laissez-faire economic orthodoxy that has lasted more than 30 years is on the ropes.
The scale of the looming energy catastrophe, as bills rise to unaffordable levels for households and small businesses, has been primarily driven by the external shock of Russia’s war in Ukraine. But as Sir Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at Oxford University, argued in an interview with the Financial Times on Monday, the crisis has exposed the deficiencies of a market that was not, in any case, fit for purpose. Energy and water, he said, are “too essential to be treated like another commodity, as some of the architects of the privatisation, liberalisation and competition paradigm believed”.
