Emma Pinchbeck

If you want to do something fast to help people, roll out insulation, roll out heat pumps, roll out electric vehicles, get your electricity price down, help industrials get clean electricity –

Yes, sort out your infrastructure on the supply side, but do a lot more on demand.

I mean, I'm now a well-behaved public servant, as you know, so I can't speculate about politics.

I'll tell you what the citizens... So we do social research with citizens, and some of that, I think, gives a clue to the politics, which is...

It's challenging.

People are skeptical about interventions in their homes.

So you have to work, you have to explain to them the benefits of this.

They read a lot of misinformation about climate change and technology.

So you have to get over that hurdle.

They are a new technology.

So they want specialist comms and support with them.

They want their installers to be able to have that conversation with them.

So there's a real need for communication.

Communication is hard and takes effort and it's not quick.

And then I think the other thing is to get electricity prices down, as the early part of this conversation revealed, is really complicated.

There are trade-offs.

Every single change, every single thing you can do to the energy market has a political win or loss to it.

In a constrained political environment and in a constrained public spending environment, it can be a hard thing to say, I'm going to move all levies into taxation.

I'm going to move levies somewhere else.

That comes to it with a short-term cost.