Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether his Department monitors the (a) difference in and (b) reasons for the difference in industrial energy prices between the UK and its competitors to enable informed policy making.

BEIS publishes statistics on international energy price comparisons[1]. These show that for the UK, industrial gas prices are among the lowest in the EU-15 but industrial electricity prices have risen to be the most expensive for large and extra-large users of electricity.

The Government is committed to minimising energy costs for businesses to ensure our economy remains strong and competitive. Higher industrial electricity prices in the UK partly reflect how the costs of the electricity system are distributed across household and industrial customers. For example, while very large German industrial users pay electricity prices that are lower than those in the UK, German households faced electricity prices that were 68 per cent higher than UK households in 2017.

In his recent energy speech, my rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State set out the importance of a fair distribution of costs and the principles that are intended to deliver policies that will lower the costs of the electricity system permanently. Further details will be set out in a White Paper this year.

The Budget on 29 October 2018 announced that £315 million is being provided for an Industrial Energy Transformation Fund to support industrial energy efficiency and decarbonisation projects to bring energy costs down for vital industries, including the steel sector.

The Government also continues to reduce the cumulative impact of energy and climate change policies on industrial electricity prices for key energy intensive industries. This includes a package of relief for these industries worth over £850 million since 2013, reducing the indirect cost of energy and climate change policies on their energy bills by up to 80 per cent.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/international-industrial-energy-prices