Robert Best

There's bits of money going in that direction, but not enough.

Because you'd think that you could...

put this together in a way that was a vote winner.

You say to people, we're going to subsidise this, your bills are going to fall by a big chunk because you do it properly, people will pay a hell of a lot less for energy.

It's funny that nobody is prepared to look through, because obviously it will be the work of years, it would take you through an election cycle, but it's funny that nobody is putting together a package like that and trying to sell it.

I mean, there's one other thing I need to ask you about.

Actually, one of the things, you know, just to take us back, because I should have said this earlier.

Actually, you know, Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, Climate Change Secretary and Desnes did announce what I thought was a pathetically minor reform to the marginal pricing by basically whacking up the tax on the fixed price generators in the hope that they would move to these so-called contracts for differences.

Yeah.

I mean, even if it does put pressure on some of them to change to a different kind of contract that will bring the price down over time for all of us, it's trivial compared to what's necessary.

Now, there's one other thing I need to talk to you about.

Because I know that there's probably not a world in which I can tempt you to say it is, and just to be clear, this is not a view I necessarily take, but there are politicians who say, like Nigel Farage, get every last drop of oil and gas out of the North Sea.

The sort of...

climate argument that some make for more exploitation of the North Sea is that the climate costs while we still need oil and gas in our economy the climate costs of importing it on tankers of actually getting it from fields where they themselves in the way that they extract the stuff is less climate friendly so there are those who say

The reason we should simply get every last drop out of the North Sea, it's not because it's going to bring the price down here very much, but actually the climate costs of exploiting stuff that's near to us in our much more responsible way makes that the right thing to do.

I agree with you.

Can you be certain about demand?

Because one of the things, again, that seems to me to be the problem with where we are now is all sorts of things have been built, whether it's generation in the wrong places or grid in the wrong places, where patently, obviously, people were totally wrong about demand.

So just to be clear, you think that the changing structure of the energy market means we can be more scientific in forecasting.

Is that what you're saying?