Truss is foolish to block Rees Mogg’s energy saving campaign

When you have defined yourself against the nanny state and scorned the idea of limiting supermarket ‘two for one’ offers, it is only natural that you will go on to reject the case for a £15 million public information campaign to try to persuade people to take fewer baths and turn their thermostats down. The Prime Minister has rejected such a campaign in spite of it being backed by her business secretary, Jacob Rees Mogg – putting Rees Mogg in the unlikely position of the nation’s nanny-in-chief.

These kind of campaigns have a bit of a poor history, as anyone who remembers the 1976 drought will recall. Hapless minister for drought Dennis Howell was ridiculed for telling us he was sharing baths with his wife Brenda and that we should do the same (presumably with our own wives, not with Brenda). You don’t have to stretch your imagination too far to work out what would happen the moment that ministers popped up on our screens to give us idiots’ advice about turning down the heating and turning off appliances. Tabloids would start stationing reporters outside the ministers’ homes to count the number of lights on, and to look up the fuel economy figures for their cars.

It is not that public information campaigns do not work. Sometimes they work only too well – as we found out with covid, where the government stands accused of whipping up unnecessary fear which has led to many people still finding it difficult to return to everyday life.

The problem is, however, that Truss has simultaneously decommissioned the alternative – and far more effective – tool for controlling demand: the price mechanism. Until a month ago, householders were being scared into saving energy by ever-more dramatic forecasts for gas and electricity prices this winter. Then came the government’s price cap which for the next 18 months will limit gas and electricity prices at the level where the average household will pay no more than £2500 a year for their energy bills.

It was inevitable that the government was going to come up with a scheme to help the poor, who really did face the prospect of being unable to keep themselves warm. But the price cap goes far further than that. It subsidises the energy bills of people who can well afford to pay to heat their homes – including billionaires with little-used second and third homes. At a stroke, the government reduced the incentive for households to cut energy use – and greatly increased the threat of blackouts if gas supplies run low.

There are really only four ways for the government to prevent blackouts this winter. It could either secure enough fuel supplies, at whatever cost, to ensure that the country will not go without. It could allow the market to regulate demand. It could employ an information campaign to try to persuade, or scare, people to use less energy. Or it could come with some formal kind of rationing. The government is attempting the first, for example through recommissioning Britain’s largest gas storage facility, but it will be touch and go. Truss has compromised option two and ruled out option three. It is hard to imagine that the government is contemplating the fourth.

Blackouts, then, (which after all are a form of rationing) could well turn out to be the result. If they occur, Truss will have to be prepared to answer the question: why did you block a public information campaign which might have prevented this?