Labour frontbencher Ed Miliband says setting up new local energy companies could be a positive future step despite a similar effort with Robin Hood Energy ending in failure. The shadow climate change secretary visited Mansfield on Thursday (February 2) to speak to college students about the Labour Party's energy policy.
The visit started at the Mansfield and Ashfield Sixth Form College, where students spoke to both Ed Miliband and Andy Abrahams, the elected Labour Mayor of Mansfield. A question from one of the students referenced the energy firm Shell recording record profits last year, and asked whether a Labour government would make sure companies such as Shell paid their fair share of tax.
Mr Miliband responded by discussing Labour's idea to create a new publicly-owned company, Great British Energy, with an aim for energy bills to be slashed and the UK becoming energy independent as a result. But discussing the need for more UK investment in the renewables sector, Mr Miliband then questioned why there couldn't be companies such as "Mansfield Energy" set up in future working alongside the national firm.
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His comments come despite the collapse of Robin Hood Energy, a not-for-profit energy company established by Nottingham City Council in 2015. Despite its ambitions for the firm, the city council announced the closure of the company in September 2020, with hundreds of jobs lost as a result.
The company came to an end due to a series of financial failings, with a damning report finding the council invested £43 million of public money into the faltering firm and accusing it of "institutional blindness" for continuing to prop it up. The failure of Robin Hood Energy was one of the reasons the Government appointed a panel to oversee the city council, with the authority having just avoided taxpayer-funded commissioners being sent in to run it.
But when asked later during the visit about Robin Hood Energy's collapse, Mr Miliband said: "The difference with our GB Energy is that GB Energy is focused on the generation of the energy, Robin Hood was obviously a supplier.
"The key thing is that at the moment, we have foreign governments coming in and investing in British energy, but we don't invest in it ourselves. We've got the French company EDF and we've got the Danish company Orsted investing in offshore wind, for example.
"It's good to have foreign investment, but 45% of our offshore wind assets are owned by foreign governments. Why shouldn't we be owning our own assets? Because then we can generate our own renewable power and that will bring jobs to areas like Mansfield."
Mansfield Mayor Andy Abrahams added: "If we haven't got the faith for Labour to invest in Mansfield, why should we ask anyone else to come and invest in us? That's what we have got to do as a country, we've got to show the way and show leadership."
Mr Miliband's visit later moved to the Ladybrook area of Mansfield, where the focus was on how homes had been made more energy efficient through council grants to install insulation and solar panels. Mr Miliband was later asked whether he supported Nottinghamshire County Council's recent move to ban fracking on all of its land, to which he said: "We've got to ban fracking and Labour would make sure that we ban fracking once and for all.
"I think I saw from my last visit what people made of fracking in Nottinghamshire, and it's not the answer. This isn't even going to cut people's bills, you don't solve a fossil fuels crisis with more fossil fuels."
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