On 22 June, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his resignation, just two years after leading Labour to a landslide election victory. Many factors will be cited in explaining his downfall, but how did his record on energy and climate hold up? In this article, LG Energy Group examines what Starmer set out to achieve, how much was delivered, and what the agenda might look like under Andy Burnham.
The 2030 Gamble: Starmer’s Promises
Labour’s 2024 manifesto, ‘Change’, placed making Britain a ‘clean energy superpower’ among its five national missions. Central to this was GB Energy, a new publicly owned company capitalised with £8.3bn from an increased windfall tax on oil and gas producers, mandated to make UK electricity zero-carbon by 2030.
Reaching that target meant roughly doubling onshore wind capacity, quadrupling offshore wind, and tripling solar generation within a few years, all squared against Labour’s tight fiscal rules. With memories of Liz Truss’s mini-budget still fresh, the party had already scaled back its green investment pledge from £28bn to £15bn a year, raising early doubts about funding. Starmer also promised a National Wealth Fund and Prosperity Plan to create 600,000 green jobs, transmission upgrades, new nuclear and small modular reactors, and greater investment in energy efficiency.
The most contentious pledge was stopping new North Sea oil and gas licences. The Conservatives warned this could cost up to 200,000 jobs and argued licensing was the only realistic way to bring down bills, while the Net Zero Scrutiny Group and Reform UK called for net zero targets to be delayed. Starmer countered that over a decade of Conservative government had left UK households paying among the highest bills in the world and that a free-market approach would mainly benefit large producers. That argument helped carry Labour to its landslide, but it also set a demanding bar for delivery.
Clean Power Superpower? How Far Did He Get?
Delivering on the Clean Power 2030 was regarded by many industry observers as an extremely demanding timetable, so how has the government performed against it?
One of Starmer’s first moves was creating the National Energy System Operator (NESO) in October 2024, an independent body working alongside GB Energy to steer the UK’s electricity and gas systems towards the 2030 targets. By late 2025, NESO had unlocked a £40bn pipeline via grid connection reforms, amounting to 283GW of new generation and storage capacity, with 2026 forecast as the first year new connections surpass 10GW.
Private capital, channelled through Contracts for Difference (CfD) auctions has also played a role. The early 2026 Allocation Round 7 auction was the largest of its kind in European history, securing a record 8.4GW of offshore wind, above forecasts of 7.5GW, alongside 4.9GW of solar and 1.3GW of onshore wind, aided by the lifting of the effective onshore wind ban. Rolls-Royce also secured the contract for the UK’s small modular reactors, backed by £600m of funding. The cumulative effect has been a genuinely thriving green economy, a clear success Starmer can point to. Research from CBI Economics puts its value at more than £100bn a year, supporting around 1.1 million jobs and renewables investment is said to have helped cut wholesale electricity prices by around a third during 2025.
Even so, ordinary consumers have felt little benefit. UK electricity prices are set by the cost of gas generation roughly 98% of the time, versus 24% in Germany and 7% in France, both of which pay close to half what the UK does per megawatt-hour, thanks to France’s nuclear reliance and Germany’s higher renewables share. Starmer pushed forward nuclear projects like Sizewell C but was slow to tackle gas-linked pricing, only announcing exploration of price decoupling in March 2026, after the Iran War broke out, overshadowing progress made elsewhere.
Non-commodity costs have climbed sharply too, now estimated at around 60% of a typical bill versus 40% for the commodity element, a direct consequence of grid investment under Clean Power 2030: TNUoS transmission charges rose around 50% in April 2026, on top of a new RAB charge introduced in October 2025 to fund nuclear infrastructure. With little reform in sight to how these costs are passed on, they look set to keep rising, another part of Starmer’s legacy his successor will inherit.
In response, Starmer’s government expanded network charge compensation through the EIIC scheme, raising support from 60% to 90% by April 2026, and introduced a second scheme, BICS, covering around 10,000 businesses. Welcome as this is, it reaches only a limited part of the economy and does little to address the underlying causes of high costs, with sectors like hospitality and leisure largely excluded. Without more fundamental reform, this patchwork approach risks a repeat of 1980s-style deindustrialisation, something Starmer’s manifesto promised to avoid. The government had to rescue British Steel at the eleventh hour in April 2025, Port Talbot’s steelworks closed in September 2024 ending a century of Welsh steelmaking, and Harland & Wolff was ultimately rescued by a foreign buyer, not Westminster. Whoever leads Labour next will need a clearer strategy for industry through the clean-power transition.
From Manchester to Westminster: Burnham’s Energy Reckoning
Andy Burnham believes he has answers to high energy prices and their knock-on effects for UK industry. He has spoken of ‘four horsemen’ behind Britain’s economic decline, deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit, and sees confronting the energy challenges Starmer left unresolved as central to reversing their impact.
In several respects, Burnham’s record echoes Starmer’s approach. As mayor of Manchester, he has set the city on course for net zero by 2038, driven by the Bee Network bus reforms and £57m invested in electric fleets and depot electrification alongside a Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund that has spent £113m retrofitting more than 6,000 homes. Both follow the same private-delivery model Starmer used through CfD contracts, and his close relationship with Ed Miliband suggests clean power’s overall direction is unlikely to shift dramatically.
Where Burnham and Starmer diverge is over public control of utilities. GB Energy’s exact role, whether a genuine state-owned provider or simply a vehicle to de-risk private investment, was never fully settled under Starmer. Burnham hasn’t explicitly called for wholesale nationalisation, but his language points towards a stronger state role, and he has been vocal that poorly performing utilities such as Thames Water should be brought into public control. A recent policy paper, The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism, from a think-tank close to Burnham hints at his direction: tax-funded relief on household and business energy levies, nationalisation of bodies such as NESO, curbing the roughly £200bn paid out in dividends across the privatised energy sector since the mid-1990s, and giving GB Energy ‘a genuine trading mandate and balance sheet to match’. Starmer created GB Energy, but Burnham could be the one to give it real purpose.
The same paper highlights a ‘fiscal escalator’, where a ‘privatisation premium’ squeezes public budgets while its supply-side causes go unaddressed. Bill-support schemes offer genuine relief but leave the core problem of high prices in place, and the paper cites them as an example of this escalator, noting such schemes cost around £40bn in 2022–23 alone. If Burnham is serious about reversing the UK’s long-term decline, tackling these fiscal challenges would be a sensible start, alongside clarifying his position on the North Sea licensing ban.
Genuine Effort, Incomplete Success
Taken as a whole, Starmer’s record on energy and climate is one of genuine, if incomplete, achievement. GB Energy, the record-breaking CfD auctions, a green economy now worth more than £100bn a year, and NESO’s connection pipeline are all legacies he can point to with pride. Yet these successes have been overshadowed by a persistent failure to tackle commodity and non-commodity cost pressures, plus an inconsistent approach to supporting industries through the transition. This unfinished business, more than any lack of ambition, seems likeliest to define history’s judgement of Starmer’s premiership on energy.
For Burnham, the task is to build on Starmer, utilising the public-private model that has delivered genuine results, while pairing it with the bolder state role, cost relief and structural reform his own allies are calling for. Whether he can succeed where Starmer struggled, particularly on bringing down the bills that shape voters’ daily lives, may prove the defining test of his leadership.