Ed Miliband’s vote-winning pledge to lower household energy bills by £300 a year was a “betrayal” of British families, the shadow energy secretary has claimed.
Claire Coutinho said the claim made by Mr Miliband during the election campaign has been proven to be “complete and utter nonsense”, as the Government prepares to make winter fuel payments means-tested for pensioners this year.
“Not only did they tell people that they were going to save £300 on energy bills, but one of their first acts in government was to take the winter fuel payment from 10m pensioners,” she said.
“So this winter, when energy bills are going up, they’ll lose up to £300. It’s been a complete betrayal of the British public.”
Ms Coutinho’s comments came just days after Ofgem, the energy regulator, confirmed household bills will rise by £149 on average to £1,717 per year from October under the latest changes to the price cap. At the same time, the Government has said it will scrap winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners this year, meaning they face a double blow later this year.
Ms Coutinho spoke over breakfast at a cafe in Oxted, a commuter village in her East Surrey constituency – one of the UK’s safest Conservative seats.
Perhaps gallingly, it is also the town where Sir Keir Starmer grew up, with East Surrey’s Young Socialists, the youth section of the local Labour Party at the time, setting him on the path to becoming Prime Minister.
Since being appointed Energy Secretary by Sir Keir, Mr Miliband has spent his first few weeks in office undoing as much as he can of Ms Coutinho’s legacy.
That includes abandoning her 10-year plan to decarbonise the UK’s electricity supply by 2035 – a time-span chosen to allow supply chains to develop.
Mr Miliband has ordered the job to be done in just five years, meaning most of the kit needed will instead have to be imported, largely from China.
Ms Coutinho, who remains her party’s representative on energy policy, said such a dramatic shortening of the timeframe spells disaster for British industry and a bonanza for China.
She said: “I think Ed Miliband’s energy policy is based on ideology rather than fact. Otherwise he would have published an assessment of the costs of his net zero plans, and of our reliance on Chinese imports, for example, on batteries, on cables, on critical minerals.
“What we are going to miss out on is the building up of a British supply chain, which I had put in place, because those things will not be ready by 2030 in the UK. So what Labour is going to have to do is import more and more from China, at the cost of British jobs.”
Mr Miliband has also reversed Ms Coutinho’s plan to get the most out of the UK’s naturally declining North Sea oil and gas fields.
Britain has been exploiting those for five decades so almost all are on the way out, with the North Sea Transition Authority predicting most will be gone by 2040.
Ms Coutinho wanted them to keep going for as long as possible so the oil and gas they produce would help support the UK during its transition to cleaner energies.
Her successor, by contrast, has immediately banned all new licensing and helped Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, to impose new taxes that will make many existing operations unviable.
It means that an increasing proportion of the 77bn cubic metres of gas and 60m tonnes of oil consumed by the UK annually will also be imported.
Ms Coutinho said: “There are going to be people who will cheer from the sidelines as our energy gets more expensive and industry declines because that decline means falling carbon emissions within our borders.
“But it’s completely myopic to think about carbon emissions in terms of only domestic production. What we would actually be doing in that scenario is moving businesses to parts of the world which have much greater carbon emissions, and that is just simply counterproductive.”
More recently, Mr Miliband has effectively reversed Ms Coutinho’s decision to allow Norwegian energy giant Equinor to exploit the massive Rosebank oil field. He announced that the Government would not defend a legal challenge brought by Greenpeace over the legitimacy of the project licence, meaning the initiative is unlikely to survive.
Ms Coutinho said the move was a “final blow” for the North Sea. “It means £9bn of tax revenue and 200,000 jobs are being put at risk plus billions of investment into clean energy just so Ed Miliband can virtue signal on the world stage,” she said. “It’s both economically and environmentally illiterate.”
One reversal that has particularly irked Ms Coutinho is a decision to approve the Sunnica solar farm that will cover 2,500 acres of Lincolnshire countryside in solar panels.
Mr Miliband’s decision came despite a damning report on the project from planning inspectors and furious opposition from local people and councillors who are now seeking a judicial review.
“People feel very passionately about climate change,” Ms Coutinho said. “But they also feel very passionately about British nature – and net zero and nature are not necessarily going to pull in the same direction.
“One of the things that I was quite worried about when I was secretary of state was very large scale solar farms, and what that was going to do to the British countryside including local economies and farming.
“With Sunnica I had personally taken the decision to reject it because I thought it was not something that was going to work for that community … but Labour has reversed my decision, claiming that as a great success, when actually I think there is a clash there with nature.”
Despite their many disagreements, both former and current energy secretaries entirely accept the climate science that underpins the drive for net zero by 2050.
And both want a future where energy is increasingly generated by wind, nuclear, solar and other low carbon sources.
Those objectives, shared across both main political parties, make a powerful contrast to countries such as the US where climate and renewables are powerful dividing lines.
For Ms Coutinho, however, the divide comes not in the targets but the means of getting there and the underlying beliefs.
“When my parents came to this country [from India], they had £200 but they wanted to make a life for themselves and their future children, me and my sister,” she said.
“They both were doctors. They worked in the NHS. We lived in terraced housing in Lewisham, south London. And they worked incredibly hard.
“They cared a lot about education and they believed in Britain as this great country where you could be aspirational, and if you put an effort, you would get rewards. And that was their fundamental value system that they passed on to me.”
A scholarship to a private school and an Oxford degree in mathematics and philosophy were followed by a spell at the investment bank Merrill Lynch.
After being elected MP for East Surrey in 2019, she earned her first ministerial role during Liz Truss’s brief and disastrous premiership as minister for disabled people.
When Rishi Sunak took over, 49 days later, he made her children and families minister until a forced reshuffle in August 2023, when she unexpectedly won promotion to energy secretary.
How does she remember those chaotic times? For now she won’t say. The Conservatives will host their party conference later this month [September], where choosing a new leader will be the key issue.
Ms Coutinho is reportedly planning to endorse Kemi Badenoch, the former business secretary. Some even suggest she plans her own leadership attempt in a few years’ time, should Ms Badenoch fail.
Negotiations are clearly under way because Ms Coutinho is keeping quiet for now.
“I don’t want to talk about the Conservative legacy issues,” Ms Coutinho said. “I’ve got pretty strong views and I have a plan for what I want to say – but I’m going to do that separately.”
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