Climate Change Committee tried to censor Claire Coutinho over the real cost of offshore wind
Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho has revealed that the Climate Change Committee attempted to silence her after she exposed serious flaws in its figures for the cost of offshore wind.
She wrote to the committee pointing out a major problem. The CCC had costed offshore wind at £38 per megawatt hour in 2030. Yet the actual strike prices in contracts, the prices consumers end up paying, were around £82.
“This is important because they advise the government,” she said. “Hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is spent based on their advice.”
The committee told her it saw no problem. She then included the point in a newspaper article. The CCC responded by complaining to The Telegraph, seeking to have her criticism removed under the press regulator’s code.
“They tried to silence me,” Mrs Coutinho said. “It was extraordinary.”
She fought the complaint and it was not upheld. “I put forward my reasons why and I fought it. But I don’t expect everybody does.”
A few months later the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero published its own updated costings. They were far higher and much closer to the figures she had flagged. In Parliament she later noted that the department’s revised numbers put the cost of offshore wind at more than £100 per megawatt hour, roughly three times what the CCC had claimed.
“Rather than have a mentality of interrogating what I’d said, working out whether it was true or not, being interested in whether they were putting forward the right advice to government, their instinct was to silence a democratically elected politician and censor her from making her arguments in the press,” she said.
Freedom of Information requests later showed the CCC has made similar complaints on other occasions. “That is not their job,” Mrs Coutinho stated. “Their job is to provide advice to government, not to go around censoring people who’ve got different opinions from them.”
Climate change is real and needs a practical response. What is not practical is driving policy with numbers that do not match the real world. The current Net Zero approach has become detached from actual costs, leaving families and businesses to pay the price through higher energy bills.
Those higher bills hit households and firms across Bracknell Forest just as they do everywhere else. Residents in Bracknell, Crowthorne, Sandhurst and Warfield deserve honest figures and open debate, not an unelected body that prefers to police speech rather than correct its own analysis.
Public bodies exist to give straight advice, not to shut down elected politicians who point out uncomfortable facts. Taxpayers deserve better than this.
As local Conservatives we cannot rewrite national energy policy on our own. What we can do is stand firmly against the costs and the silencing of debate that hit our area, back those who tell the truth, and build the strength needed to change course nationally. If you share that view...
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