The State of Britain by Richard Lyon

Five British government documents crossed the radar this week, and each one concedes, in its operative text, a cost, a risk or a weakness that its own press line does not carry. Nothing was leaked and nothing was dug out; the concessions sit in plain sight on gov.uk, one click below the headline. Candour of this kind is welcome, and worth taking seriously because it is official. What follows is the small print, read. START WITH THE gas paper.

ON 28 AUGUST​ the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero published a document. It’s called an Expenditure Forecast Statement, it runs to a handful of pages, and it exists because Regulation 20 of the Green Gas Support Scheme Regulations requires it every quarter. Nobody seems to have noticed, and that seems to be the intention. It sits on gov.uk under a heading built for regulators to tick a box rather than for the public to notice.

The week Whitehall conceded the thing it’s legislating to abolish, and tried to answer adequacy in gigawatts. Kept on board, rarely launched, never optional. There is a trick to reading an energy document — “find the unit”. This week supplied a master class in it. A storage plan stated in gigawatts is telling you how fast it can pour, not how much is in the jug. A reactor business case stated in jobs is telling you what it employs, not what it costs.

The bill is not the cost. For years the argument about Britain’s energy policy has been an argument about a number: what it costs. This week the government gave its answer. It didn’t cut the cost; it rearranged where the cost appears. In seven days it published a scheme to route industrial relief around the household bill, a discount that spreads the price of new pylons across every bill in the country, and carbon limits that forbid the adequacy fleet to do the thing it is paid to do.

WHEN I was a boy, I was told there would be flying cars. Tonight, we are being told to turn our washing machines off because the sun is going behind the moon. This is what rationing looks like. Be clear about what is not the embarrassing part. An eclipse is the most predictable event in nature — the Babylonians could forecast one, and an astronomer will tell you to the second when the shadow reaches each solar farm in Europe.

‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Rationing is flexibility.’ — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (revised and updated by NESO) FOR YEARS the working assumption of the electricity system was that supply follows demand: you flick the switch, the grid responds. This week the paperwork for the opposite arrangement arrived.

From today’s generating fleet to the one the Committee’s 2050 pathway describes, technology by technology. ON 23 JUNE Britain’s grid came far closer to failing than most people realise, and on Kathryn Porter’s account published last week, control-room engineers described themselves as flying blind for want of adequate modelling. One called a major blackout “an engineering certainty”. Two quite different things go by the name of modelling the grid: choosing a system, and operating one.

SOMETHING UNUSUAL HAPPENED in the energy news this week: the government kept saying the quiet part aloud. The machinery the net-zero plan leans on — priced flexibility, mature storage, falling bills — was contradicted three times in seven days, and in each case the contradiction came from the department’s own publications.

On the afternoon of 28 April 2025, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal for ten hours. Eight people died during the event. A study published two months later by Imperial College and Spain’s Instituto de Salud Carlos III, using the country’s official mortality surveillance system, found a further 147 excess deaths over the three days from 28 April — a 4.2% rise over expected mortality, concentrated among women aged 85 and over. The 95% confidence interval ran t​o 330.

This week on the Subsidy Clock we are looking at the scheme with the dullest name and the largest bill: the Renewables Obligation. It stands at over £92 billion. That makes it the largest subsidy on Britain’s electricity market, and the quietest. THE RENEWABLES OBLIGATION does not sound like money. It sounds like a regulation — a target, a box to tick. It is all of those things. It is also the largest single subsidy on your electricity bill that almost nobody has heard of.