UK energy policy: 20 people to lobby at Labour conference

Ministers newly installed in their Whitehall offices. Special advisers moving from opposition to government. The first Labour administration for 14 years — and one marked in its early weeks by a raft of energy and climate promises which could, at least in theory, transform the country.

As the party gathers in Liverpool this weekend, we have the ultimate power list: Who holds influence over U.K. energy policy?

The advisers

Tobias Garnett

Wondering about the tall, Rasputin-y figure standing behind Ed Miliband at various speaking engagements? That’d be Tobias Garnett. A lawyer by training, Garnett became a Labour adviser on energy and climate in 2020 after a stint working for Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign. In opposition, he attracted some unwelcome press attention from right-leaning papers because of his previous legal work on behalf of Extinction Rebellion. But Miliband and Starmer stood foursquare behind him — and now he’s steering policy in government.

Carys Roberts

Former think tank boss Roberts is Keir Starmer’s No 10 policy lead on climate, energy and environment. Before joining government she was executive director at the left-leaning Institute for Public Research (IPPR) think tank, where she focused on inequality, fiscal policy and labor markets. It’s a hinterland consistent with Labour’s determination to ground the green agenda in wider goals of economic growth, job creation and help for household budgets.

Jonty Leibowitz

Ed Miliband’s gatekeeper, Leibowitz worked as an adviser to the energy secretary while in opposition for four years. He’s now special adviser in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, leading on media engagement. After graduating from Cambridge in 2017 he spent two years at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies before being drafted in by Miliband in 2020.

The ministers

Ed Miliband

Sixteen years ago, he was Gordon Brown’s climate change secretary. Nine years ago, he quit as Labour leader. And now he is back at the center of Westminster power again, an energy security and net zero secretary handed a mandate to accelerate the U.K.’s pursuit of clean power domestically and climate leadership overseas. Net zero doubters call him a dangerous zealot, while Miliband’s allies claim he is racing ahead precisely because he understands the green challenges ahead.

Sarah Jones

Jones’ dual role in government — as a joint decarbonization minister in DESNZ and industry minister at the Department for Business and Trade — puts her at the heart of decisions driving Labour over the next five years. Jones, MP for Croydon since 2017, will also have to navigate the contradictions between the Treasury’s demand to ramp up trade and growth with the government’s simultaneous ambitions to keep carbon emissions under control.

Miatta Fahnbulleh

It is a meteoric rise by any measure — Fahnbulleh was named consumers minister at DESNZ (think: bills, regulating energy firms) just days after entering the Commons for the first time, leapfrogging dozens more experienced colleagues on the green benches. She comes to the role after holding senior positions at two influential left-of-center think tanks (the Institute for Public Policy Research and the New Economics Foundation) and advising Miliband during his time as opposition leader. In her think tank days, she backed £30 billion a year in green spending, a far cry from the more modest £7 billion Starmer has now promised.

Michael Shanks

Michael Shanks only found his way into the House of Commons last October, but has been handed one of Labour’s biggest ministerial tasks: steering the government’s new, state-owned clean energy company, Great British Energy, into being. Shanks will be in charge of its bid to invest in renewables projects and back green tech, the success or failure of which will go a long way to defining Labour’s climate record by 2029. As if that wasn’t enough, the former teacher will also oversee the highly contentious future of the North Sea.

Philip Hunt

Energy policy’s man in the House of Lords, Hunt is a Westminster veteran who worked with Miliband during the secretary of state’s last stint in high office back between 2008 and 2010. Hunt will oversee the government’s nuclear aspirations, with the sector in urgent need of revival after nearly 30 years where no new power plants have been built in the U.K.

Darren Jones

As chief secretary to the Treasury — and Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ guardian of the public purse strings — Darren Jones will play a central role as the government pushes ahead with its green agenda.  Jones was previously chair of the Business Energy and Industrial Strategy committee, where he cross-examined ministers and a range of sector experts on industrial decarbonization. He is also aware of the scale of private investment — backed by government — needed to green the U.K. economy.  

The officials

Chris Stark 

Former Climate Change Committee chief Chris Stark is tasked with overseeing perhaps the most ambitious target of this parliament: the government’s plan to decarbonize the U.K. electricity grid by 2030. Stark was appointed head of the new JFK-inspired “mission control” unit within Whitehall in July and will oversee a team of civil servants as they work through the nitty-gritty of overhauling the grid and getting more green projects online within five years. His forthcoming plan — due before Christmas — will be “controversial,” Stark admitted in September. Hold onto your hats.

Juergen Maier

Great British Energy’s “start-up” chair is a former Labour adviser who also has experience at the top of a major energy and technology firm, the U.K wing of Siemens, which Maier led from 2013 to 2019. Maier is no stranger to politics and was an outspoken business commentator on Brexit (a process he became increasingly exasperated about.) In his new role he’s been tasked with getting the government’s publicly run energy company off the ground before the permanent management team comes in.

Fintan Slye

You know that feeling where you tell Keir Starmer it’s possible to decarbonize the power grid by 2030 but then he wins an election and you actually have to do it? Well never fear, Fintan Slye is here. An engineer by training, Slye is about to become the boss of the new nationalized Energy System Operator — NESO. He will be working with Ed Miliband and Chris Stark to draw up plans for getting to clean power 2030. In other words — a plan for a rapid buildout of renewables and grid infrastructure to transform the country and effectively end the age of gas-powered electricity in Britain. No pressure, Fintan.

The politicians

Polly Billington MP

Billington clinched the seat of East Thanet this summer from net zero skeptic Craig Mackinlay and made it clear she wants to use her seat to talk about net zero in a slightly different way. She has just been elected co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for renewable and sustainable energy and described climate action as an “economic as well as an environmental imperative.. Oh, and she should be able to get into DESNZ to make her views known — Billington was Ed Miliband’s special adviser during his last spell in government.

Uma Kumaran MP

Kumaran comes to Westminster fresh from C40, the international network of nearly 100 cities and their climate-conscious mayors, all pushing for stronger action on global warming. And she has exemplary Labour backroom credentials, as a former adviser to London Mayor Sadiq Khan (until 2020) and as Keir Starmer’s deputy director of parliamentary affairs (2020 to 2022.)

Huw Irranca-Davies MS

Possibly the busiest politician in Cardiff’s Senedd, Irranca-Davies is Wales’ deputy first minister and cabinet secretary for climate change and rural affairs. He has a serious job on his hands — not least finding a way to deliver long-delayed agriculture policies which can steer the region to net zero without alienating swathes of rural Welsh voters. The Climate Change Committee is breathing down Irranca-Davies’s neck, too — “low ambition” on his side of the Severn threatens U.K.-wide green targets, they warn. 

Melanie Onn MP

The Labour MP for Great Grimsby, who regained her seat this summer after losing it in 2019, Onn will be well known to energy wonks from her time as deputy chief executive of the industry body Renewable UK. She narrowly missed out in a bid to become chair of parliament’s Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, but ministers can expect a vocal, well-informed and immaculately connected voice from the backbenchers.

The influencers

Gary Smith

It is entirely possible that when Labour’s energy team have nightmares, they feature Gary Smith. As head of the GMB union, which represents thousands of oil and gas workers in the North Sea, Smith has led fierce resistance to Labour plans to pull back from new drilling. And he is not shy to share his view of the keynote policy of clean power by 2030: “impossible.”

Emma Pinchbeck

Boss of the influential trade body Energy UK, and once senior at RenewablesUK and conservation charity the WWF, Pinchbeck is rarely far away if major debates about energy policy are being had. And if she has the ear of Whitehall now, Pinchbeck may yet end up commanding even more influence in political circles — rumors and media stories about her filling the vacant position at the top of the Climate Change Committee have never quite gone away.

The scrutineers

Bill Esterson MP

Esterson became the Commons’ chief energy policy watcher this month when he bagged the chair of parliament’s Energy Security and Net Zero Committee. The former shadow minister for business, energy and industrial strategy told POLITICO that he wanted to use the role to “scrutinize just how we can make the most of the opportunities which the transition to a low carbon economy can offer.” He, too, will doubtless have ministers and officials before his committee shortly for a going over.

Toby Perkins MP

When ministers’ pet projects have an impact on the environment, Toby Perkins is the MP to whom they will have to answer. A former shadow rural affairs minister under Keir Starmer, he is the new chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, where he will — if he is anything like his respected predecessor, Tory MP Philip Dunne — enjoy the chance to drag in ministers and experts for interrogation.