Andy Burnham is expected to back new North Sea drilling at the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields within days of taking office, alongside plans to bring water and energy companies back under public control. It’s worth asking the obvious question before anyone celebrates a new drilling announcement as an energy-bill fix: whose oil and gas is it actually going to be?
The honest answer is: not really ours, even though it comes out of our seabed.
Why Drilling More Doesn’t Lower a Single Bill
The licences to explore and extract in the North Sea belong to private companies — Shell, BP, Equinor, and others — and those companies are under no legal obligation to sell what they extract to the UK, or at any price lower than they can get elsewhere. Roughly 80% of North Sea oil and 61% of North Sea gas is exported and sold on the open international market, because that’s where the best price usually is. A government minister confirmed as recently as December 2025 that there are no plans to force private companies to allocate any of this oil or gas for domestic use first. Oil and gas prices are set globally, and a barrel extracted twelve miles off Aberdeen is priced exactly the same as a barrel extracted anywhere else in the world, regardless of whose seabed it came from.
So when a new licence is approved on the promise of “energy security” or “lower bills,” what’s actually being approved is more resource for private companies to sell to the highest global bidder — which may or may not be a British household. If we genuinely ring-fenced a portion of domestic production for domestic use, sold directly to UK consumers outside the open market mechanism, that would be a policy capable of actually lowering bills. Approving more extraction while leaving the sales model exactly as it is simply grows the private profit at the extraction stage. It doesn’t touch what you pay in April.
The Result: The Most Expensive Electricity in the Democratic World
And what you pay is genuinely among the highest anywhere. The UK has the highest industrial electricity prices of the 28 countries tracked by the International Energy Agency — roughly four times US prices and well above the IEA median. On the domestic side, the UK had the second-highest household electricity price in the G7 in 2024, behind only Germany, and ahead of Italy, France, Japan, the US, and Canada. Industrial electricity prices rose 124% between 2019 and 2024 — four times the rate of increase seen in the US over the same period. This isn’t a temporary spike from a single bad year. It’s a sustained, structural gap that’s been widening since around 2008, when UK prices were actually below Germany’s.
The Standing Charge: Paying to Be Allowed to Pay
Then there’s the standing charge — a fixed daily fee, currently averaging around £300 a year between gas and electricity combined, charged regardless of how much energy you actually use. It covers network maintenance, meter reading, and — this is the part that should raise eyebrows — a contribution toward the cost of bailing out energy suppliers that have gone bust. It now makes up roughly a fifth of the average dual-fuel bill, before a single kilowatt-hour has been consumed.
Picture a gym that charges you a locked-in monthly membership fee whether or not you ever walk through the door — except this gym also quietly folds the cost of its rivals going bankrupt into your membership price, and you have no way to leave, because it’s the only gym in your postcode and every other gym works exactly the same way. That’s the standing charge. You’re not just paying for what you use. You’re paying rent on the privilege of eventually being allowed to use anything at all, plus a cut of somebody else’s failed business model, whether you consume one unit of energy that year or none.
Net Zero Costs Are Real, and Nobody’s Being Honest About Who Pays
Layered on top of all of this are the levies that fund renewable energy schemes and grid decarbonisation — a genuinely worthwhile long-term goal, and one I broadly support. But it’s dishonest to pretend these costs are free or invisible. They sit directly on household bills, at a moment when a very large number of people are choosing between heating and eating. Wanting a greener grid and being unable to absorb the current cost of building one are not contradictory positions — they’re both true at once for a huge number of households, and the policy conversation rarely admits that tension honestly.
Fuel Isn’t Cheap Either, Even If We’re Not Literally the World’s Most Expensive
To be fair to the numbers rather than overstating the case: the UK isn’t the single most expensive country on Earth for petrol or diesel — plenty of countries, particularly in Asia and parts of the EU, charge more at the pump in absolute terms. But UK fuel duty is genuinely among the highest in Europe: currently the fourth-highest diesel duty and tenth-highest petrol duty among EU member states, set to climb further as a temporary 5p cut is phased out through 2026 and 2027. Tax — duty plus VAT — makes up roughly 55-60% of every litre sold at a UK pump. That’s not a global record. It’s still a genuinely heavy, specifically British premium layered onto a product whose underlying commodity price is identical to what everyone else in the world is paying.
Is There Anything We Actually Do Cheaply?
Put it all together and the pattern becomes hard to ignore: the most expensive railway per mile among comparable countries, energy prices at or near the top of every international league table despite sitting on our own gas and oil reserves, a fixed daily charge just for the right to eventually consume anything, and fuel taxed more heavily than most of our European neighbours. None of this is really about “Britain” as a place — it’s about a specific pattern of decisions: privatising national resources and infrastructure, then leaving the resulting profits to flow to private companies and international markets rather than back to the people who actually own the ground it all sits on. Burnham reportedly taking energy and water back into public control alongside the drilling announcement suggests even this government recognises that pattern needs breaking. Whether reversing thirty years of that model in one term is realistic is a different question entirely — but at least, for once, the direction of travel is being questioned rather than quietly accepted.
