Britain's expensive energy problem – with Claire Coutinho

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Politics, Government, Daily News

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

Britain has an energy problem – while we produce some of the cleanest in the world, it's also the most expensive, and that's the case for almost every avenue of energy. On the day the Spectator hosts its Energy Summit in Westminster, a report commissioned by the Prime Minister has found that the UK is the most expensive place to produce nuclear energy. This is important for so many avenues of government – from future proofing for climate change, to reducing the burden households are facing through the cost-of-living crisis.

Claire Coutinho, shadow secretary of state for energy, and political editor Tim Shipman join economics editor Michael Simmons to talk about tackling Britain's energy crisis and how energy policy could feed into Labour's budget in two days time. Plus, as the only shadow minister to retain the same brief following the 2024 general election, Claire reveals her reflections on climate and energy policy, including reaffirming the Conservatives desire to tackle climate change but arguing that the target of net zero now does seem 'perverse'.

Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Subscribe to The Spectator in our Black Friday Flash Sale and you'll get 12 weeks of the magazine, along with full access to all of our online content, for just £12. Not only that, but we'll also send you a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Whiskey worth £30 on the shops, absolutely free.
0:18.3	Hurry though, this ridiculously good offer, ends on the 1st of December.
0:22.6	Go to www.
0:25.3	Spectator.com.uk.
0:28.5	forward slash Friday.
0:35.2	Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm Michael Simmons, the Spectator's Economics Editor,
0:41.5	and today I'm joined by our political editor, Tim Shipman, and Claire Coutinho, Shadow Energy Secretary.
0:48.9	Tim, today we're hosting the Spectator Energy Summit. Why are we doing that? Why is energy policy so important?
0:56.9	Well, it's one of the sort of big things that defines not only a sort of cost of living issue now.
1:03.7	Energy costs are through the roof and I think it's one of those things that people understand and feel in their pocket.
1:09.6	And a lot of the politics over the last few years has been about the cost of energy.
1:14.5	You know, the trust government got into huge amounts of trouble in part because they needed to try and spend lots of money on helping people with their bills.
1:23.0	The Labour government is still wrestling with the same kind of issues of cost of living.
1:28.5	But you've also got an international kind of arena in which a lot of scary stuff is happening in the world,
1:35.1	with wars and political conflict, and that has a huge impact on the price of oil
1:41.0	and what that means for your energy mix.
1:43.4	And I think, you know, a government that is
1:46.2	desperate to get growth tries to tell a story about sort of green growth and green jobs and how
1:52.3	that's going to help in the future. But most of the experts seem to think that when the advantages
1:57.2	of that are had, it's some way down the track. And you've got a government
2:01.2	wrestling with sort of immediate issues of cost of living, trying to also deal with bigger
2:06.1	issues of security, a security of supply, the ability to, you know, pay for your own energy
	...

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