This newbie UK minister faces a baptism of fire on a key Labour promise

LONDON — Miatta Fahnbulleh is a new MP juggling one of Whitehall’s trickiest tasks: slashing Brits’ energy bills at a time the government is strapped for cash.

Elected for the first time in July, she was handed a ministerial brief within days. It is a rise so rapid that Fahnbulleh has a red box but still not a constituency office.

The economist, former think tank boss and newbie minister at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is now responsible for delivering one of Labour’s pivotal pledges for this parliament.

Breaking an election promise to cut sky-high energy bills could “mobilize” populist political forces against the government, Fahnbulleh has admitted. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is already gunning for Labour over energy costs. The Conservative opposition has promised to pressure ministers on it at “every possible opportunity.”

So it falls to Fahnbulleh to deliver a string of multi-billion-pound home heat schemes. The hope is that, by kitting out U.K. homes with better insulation and greener, more efficient heating systems, bills will start to fall.

But she is already battling headwinds. 

Those schemes have historically struggled to get off the ground. Green funding has been sliced up by the Labour leadership. Fahnbulleh was forced to suspend dozens of Whitehall-backed installation firms at the start of the year over shoddy insulation work, while the decision to end universal winter fuel payments to pensioners has undermined public confidence in the government. 

And, most importantly, all those plans to drive down bills are “bound up with the need to secure financing from [the] Treasury,” said one industry figure familiar with government planning.

As Chancellor Rachel Reeves eyes ways to curb public spending, Fahnbulleh won’t get far without the weight of Number 11 behind her.

‘Can’t mess this up’

“I think my first thought was just like — ‘Okay, well, that’s a big job. Better get on with it. Can’t mess this up,’” Fahnbulleh said, recalling the moment Chief Whip Alan Campbell called with a job offer from the prime minister after Labour’s landslide election win last summer.

By then she had already shown she could fulfill one key task for any Labour hopeful — uniting the party’s often-warring factions. 

She was picked as Labour’s candidate in Peckham, south-east London, in 2022 with over 60 percent of the vote in the first round, said one local party member who supported her campaign. She won that contest because she was able to “unite the left” of the constituency party with the center ground, including through her stance on green issues, they said. 

Inside work “she’s pretty relentless,” said one former colleague, granted anonymity to speak candidly about their time working with Fahnbulleh. “She always comes at things from a position of — ‘If I get everyone in the room and we just talk this through, I think we can find a way through it,’” they said.

And outside work? You’ll find her “tearing up the dancefloor” on a night out, said another friend and former colleague. 

Outsider turned insider

Fahnbulleh, once an aide to now Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, spent six years heading up one of the country’s leading left-leaning think tanks, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), before becoming an MP. 

“My background is an economist. I chose that path because I grew up seeing the economy not working for a whole swathe of our society,” she told POLITICO in an interview late last year. “For me, how we start to change the settlement has always been core to what I’ve been trying to do.” 

Fahnbulleh came to the U.K. alongside her parents and brother as refugees in 1986, fleeing war in Liberia. “I defied the odds,” she said in an interview just before her selection in Peckham. 

“She saw a lot when she was younger,” said the first former colleague quoted above. “[She] has experienced a lot of different things but also has seen, in various different roles she’s had, the effects of what happens when the economy doesn’t work for people.” 

“She’s a progressive at heart,” said a third former colleague, who has worked closely with Fahnbulleh.

Now installed in the government, though, she may find it hard to implement the sort of bold policies she once pushed for from the outside. Lobbying for change from a think tank is one thing — ushering it in under the watchful eye of a Treasury bent on fiscal rules is another.

While at the NEF, Fahnbulleh urged the government to invest £30 billion per year in the green transition. But Labour dumped their old net zero spending pledges ahead of the election, and Fahnbulleh and her DESNZ colleagues will now have less than that to spend across the whole of this parliament.

NEF, under her leadership, also lobbied against a third runway at Heathrow airport on climate grounds. Yet as the Treasury desperately pursues economic growth, Heathrow expansion has become government policy.

Pressure

Other funding has not yet come through in full. Just £3.4 billion has been committed for home heat schemes out of an initial pledge to spend £6 billion a year by the end of the parliament. The government promised more details on its flagship Warm Homes Plan in the spring — but that has now been delayed to after June’s crucial spending review. 

Questions about how to fund climate-friendly improvements for people’s homes will only become more pressing over time. The existing Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which makes grants to people swapping their gas boilers for cleaner heat pumps, will “not cover every single home” which needs to switch as the U.K. bids to hit net zero by 2050, Emma Pinchbeck, boss of the independent Climate Change Committee, warned last week.

Meantime, Fahnbulleh, once the think tank lobbyist, is being lobbied herself to overhaul energy bills right now and help around six million homes still suffering from fuel poverty.

“Call it a social tariff. Call it what you want. We need to say: ‘These are the people who really need some help, and work with government to get them that help,” Dhara Vyas, chief executive of the industry group Energy UK, warned earlier this month.

On this, one NEF policy has made its way into Whitehall. The energy regulator is looking at putting guardrails on basic energy needs as one means to protect people from soaring bills, echoing proposals made by her think tank in 2023.

All about bills

Energy bills are set to rise again this April, around ten months after Labour won a thumping mandate on a pledge to cut them by up to £300. Opposition parties are already hammering the government to put a date on when bills will fall, and by how much. 

“At every available opportunity, we’ll be asking Ed Miliband when our bills are going to start coming down,” said the Conservative’s interim Shadow Energy Secretary, Andrew Bowie.

That £300 figure could “rise in salience quite quickly” come the next election, argued Luke Tryl, director of the More in Common think tank.

“What I think is going to be more challenging — but I assume will be what they actually argue — is bills are lower than they would have been,” he said. But that doesn’t leave Labour a lot of political space. “It’s really hard to do that for the public, because we know that loss aversion is far stronger than things that people gain,” Tryl added.

Fahnbulleh concedes that support for the country’s green plans could unravel if bills don’t fall. If the government does not get bills down, a “movement on the other side” will “mobilize people against this agenda,” she warned ominously at Labour Party conference in September. 

Treasury trouble

The big moment is now the summer spending review, when Fahnbulleh will be pitching for the extra billions needed to meet the party’s pledge of upgrading five million homes this parliament. 

“There’s frankly very little that Miatta can achieve within the department,” said the industry figure quoted above. Everything rests on Treasury largesse, they said.

They added: “She is trying to highlight to the leadership of the party and to cabinet ministers that they have made very big promises ahead of 2029 and [that], at the moment, they are not on track to deliver those promises in terms of energy bill reductions.”

Getting the Treasury onside is tricky for ministers at the best of times. That’s especially true at a time the chancellor has promised to bring an “iron fist” to public spending. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is already squirreling away any spare cash for defense.

“It’s always difficult when you’re a junior minister in another department and you’ve already got £3.4 billion pounds in the bag, and the chancellor is going to have what is going to be one of the most difficult statements the chancellor has had to make for some time — just because the money isn’t there at the moment,” said one former No. 10 official.

For all the obstacles, Fahnbulleh has “the caliber to be able to pull this off,” according to the third former colleague cited above.

And she knows what’s at stake.

“She will be running [in the 2029 election], Labour will be running again, and they’ll be in a very tough spot if they don’t deliver,” the same person said. “I think she’s acutely aware of that as well.”