In a speech last Thursday, energy secretary Amber Rudd claimed that Britain leaving the EU could add £500 million to the country’s total domestic and corporate energy bills.
The figures she cited come from research conducted by the National Grid, which was based on us leaving the EU and thus no longer being part of the European internal energy market. The £500 million added cost to bills would be spread across domestic and business energy customers, meaning each household would be paying between £13 and £20 more each year.
“If we left the European Internal Market,” Rudd said, “we’d get a massive electric shock because UK energy costs are likely to rocket by at least half a billion pounds a year – the equivalent of British bills going up by around £1.5 million each and every day.”
Her claims were quickly questioned by Matthew Elliott who heads the Vote Leave campaign.
He said: “Amber Rudd’s absurd claims simply aren’t backed up by her own research. It is quite extraordinary the extent to which the government is willing to do down Britain in its desperate attempt to win the referendum.
“In fact,” he argued, “the EU makes our energy bills more expensive and costs us £350 million a week.
“If we want cheaper bills, less commission interference and the ability to spend our money on our priorities, then the safe option is to vote leave.”
Amber Rudd, as well as arguing that leaving the EU would make our bills more expensive, warned of potential bullying from Putin over the use of Russian gas, were we to leave the European internal market.
She said: “relying on energy from abroad is not without risk. We have seen how countries such as Putin’s Russia use their gas supply as a tool of foreign policy. Threatening to cut off supplies or drastically increase prices.”
She went on to argue about the strength of a united European Union in the face of potential strong-arming from countries like Russia.
“As a bloc of 500 million people,” she said, “we have the power to force Putin’s hand. We can coordinate our response to a crisis. We can use the power of the internal market to source gas from elsewhere. We can drive down the price of imports, as has happened recently in Eastern Europe.
“To put it plainly – when it comes to Russian gas, united we stand, divided we fall.”
The Russian embassy have hit back at Rudd’s claims, arguing that they both unfounded and inappropriate.
Their statement said that Rudd’s comments “misrepresent the situation and defy the logic of this business as it applies to Britain.”
They argued that first and foremost, the supply of Russian gas is actually “relatively small within the UK’s energy balance”. Currently, the EU import around 30% of their gas from Russia and a deal signed last year between Centrica and Russia’s Gazprom mean that the latter will provide around 9% of Britain’s gas.
Around 43% of Britain’s gas comes from our own operations in the North Sea, with 44% coming from the EU and Norway. The rest (13%) comes imported by ships in the form of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), a large portion of which comes from Qatar.
The statement from the Russian embassy highlighted the fact that the gas imports we get from Russia actually come through the EU, and so leaving it is, in their view, unlikely to mean further reliance on the country for our gas.
They said: “Russian gas comes to the UK through continental Europe, therefore Brexit could have quite the opposite effect [to that which Rudd claimed], with potential increase in UK’s dependence on the LNG supply from Qatar.”
However, Rudd’s claims may still have some basis if, were we to leave, we would have to pursue independent import deals with Russia without the support of the already established frameworks that the EU currently works within.
The Russian embassy went on to criticise Rudd for bringing them in to what they considered to be a “domestic quarrel”.
“We consider the above comments of Ms Rudd to be made for ‘domestic consumption’ in the context of the EU referendum campaign. Why drag Russia into this domestic quarrel, which must be fought on the merits of the issue in question?”
