Mission aborted? The quiet dissolving of Mission Control
With Chris Stark and other senior figures heading for the exit and the Clean Power Unit being folded into DESNZ’s central strategy function, the team that drove the 2030 target is being quietly wound down. Sector insiders tell Utility Week what its loss could mean for clean power, amid government's evolving attitude to fossil fules and increasing focus on bills and affordability.
By David Blackman, policy correspondent
Mission aborted? The quiet dissolving of Mission Control
With Chris Stark and other senior figures heading for the exit and the Clean Power Unit being folded into DESNZ’s central strategy function, the team that drove the 2030 target is being quietly wound down. Sector insiders tell Utility Week what its loss could mean for clean power, amid government's evolving attitude to fossil fules and increasing focus on bills and affordability.
By David Blackman, policy correspondent
Hands up who remembers the five missions of Keir Starmer’s government? Chances are few will, given how quickly the former prime minister dropped the initiative that was meant to give his government a driving purpose*. The one mission that still had legs by the end of Starmer’s truncated term in No 10 Downing Street was the goal to achieve carbon-free electricity by 2030.
However, Chris Stark, who had been head of the 'Mission Control' set up to spearhead delivery of clean power by the end of the decade, has announced he is leaving the role at the end of this year. The former Climate Change Committee (CCC) chief executive was followed out the door a few days later by the director of the Clean Power 2030 Unit Ben Golding, who is taking on a new role within the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) as director of affordability and retail.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Mills, who was previously the DESNZ director general with responsibility for the clean power mission, has been given an equivalent ranked role covering energy security and resilience, economic growth and international engagement. This is part of a wider reorganisation of the department, which includes the recruitment of three new director generals.
Announcing his new role, Golding said that the Clean Power Unit was becoming part of DESNZ’s central strategy capability. Giving evidence to the House of Commons energy committee last week, DESNZ permanent secretary Jonathan Brearley said the department still has the unit and its capability to monitor delivery. However, the departure of so many key personnel, including some “big driving forces” means the unit is “effectively being disbanded”, says one ex-senior official.
It comes as Andy Burnham's government gave the much-trailed green light to production at the Jackdaw gas field, citing the need for a "pragmatic" approach to the North Sea.
‘Mission Control was Miliband’s thing’
“Gently dissolved” is the take of Adam Bell, energy partner at PF Global and a civil service veteran, on the changes at the unit. Noting that some of the unit had already moved into working on the government’s broader electrification strategy, he says: “It's a culmination of a process rather than a hard break.”
Part of what Bell describes as a trade-off is the formation of a “much expanded” ministerial office with the appointment of former National Energy System Operator corporate affairs director Jake Rigg as the principal policy adviser to the new energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh.
“Whereas you had the Clean Power Unit more embedded within the firmament of the department, you now have a much more powerful and hefty and political office that's able to drive change in a slightly different way,” says Bell.
The changes at the Clean Power Unit follow hot on the heels of Ed Miliband’s replacement by Fahnbulleh in the summer Cabinet reshuffle triggered by Burnham’s ascent to PM.
Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, says: “Mission Control was largely Miliband’s thing and Miatta has come in with a different focus, talking about affordability and electrification. Whereas Mission Control was more on the supply side, electrification is more on the demand side.”
The lower profile role for the Clean Power Unit isn’t just about the change of secretary of state though, it's “more about the stage in the journey that we're at”, according to Bell.
“All the big choices for 2030 have now been made and they're either going to sink or swim. It does feel like a natural break point, almost regardless of Miliband,” he says, adding that “different structures” may be needed now.
Ralston agrees, noting that the last big chunk of generation required to reach the 2030 target is due to be delivered by the next Contracts for Difference allocation round (AR8) auction, the results of which are due in mid-February. “Once they've come out, that largely means the power projects for 2030 are set,” she says, noting that by the time Stark leaves at the end of this year, Fahnbulleh will have received the unit’s advice on AR8.
“We are not quite there yet but we are well on the way,” says Holly Brazier-Tope, director of politics at the Green Alliance umbrella group of environmental NGOs.
Fahnbulleh has insisted, most recently at last week’s grilling by the Commons energy security committee, that she remains committed to the government’s clean power target. However, the absorption of the unit responsible into DESNZ’s strategy functions comes at a point when the secretary of state has signalled a shift in departmental priorities, says Ed Matthew, UK director at the climate change think tank E3G.
“There is a new found priority focus for Miatta Fahnbulleh on bringing down energy bills, job creation and making a difference at the local level,” he says.
“The focus has moved away from the primary mission of hitting the 2030 target to one saying we have to make this affordable and bring people along with us.
“With the new prime minister’s political priorities, they're not formally about to give up on the clean power mission and the target but meeting that target is no longer the number one thing the department exists to do.”
Given the wider energy market context, this shift was inevitable, says Brazier-Tope: “Right now the focus is changing to fairness and affordability and what all of this means for households and businesses. What's going to happen to the price in January is looking fairly terrifying across the board and it is right for that focus to shift.”
Virginia Sentance, head of the energy team at Flint Global, notes that Burnham didn’t refer to the 2030 target in his keynote Labour conference speech. “It was all about energy in the service of people and businesses, which is a very different and much more politically-savvy narrative,” she says, adding that while clean power is a good organising principle it is also quite technocratic.
“Labour was never going to lose the next election because it doesn't meet Clean Power 2030, but it could lose the next election if it doesn't get people's bills down.”
A hard target can be useful
There's “absolutely no question” that the new ministerial team at DESNZ are committed to decarbonising the energy system but they recognise there is a real risk to the success of the energy transition if people feel like it is leaving them behind, says Matthew.
However, the unit has been absolutely vital in pushing the government’s clean power efforts forward, says Brazier-Tope. It oversaw the production of DESNZ’s Clean Power 2030 strategy, which mapped out the projects and infrastructure required to meet it.
Sentance, who oversaw the government’s hosting of 2021’s COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, says: “In government it's always useful to have a hard target to run at and something that people can mobilise around, whether that's the civil servants, the politicos, the investors or businesses.
“Having a unit is a good thing. If you have a priority, get someone like Chris and give them a team and let them run at stuff,” she says, adding that the most effective work in government typically gets done by units reporting directly to the PM or a minister.
Noting how working in government is often like “wading through treacle”, Bell says: “[The unit] very much acted as a galvanising function and was able to sit on top of the department and kick different people.
“You probably would have had a lot slower action on transition and renewables build out in the absence of the mission.”
Valuable too was the unit’s hands-on work helping deliver projects deemed key for the clean power target, he says: “You had specific people within DESNZ facing the major infrastructure projects necessary to deliver Clean Power 2030 and who were able to push things through the system at pace. That direct relationship with particular projects is something that probably has a lot of value and I hope that's not entirely lost.”
And having Stark at the helm has been “absolutely integral” to the unit’s success, says Sarah Honan of ADE: Demand.
Agreeing, Bell says: “You need someone with Chris’s gravitas to make it work. He ran a significant organisation [the CCC], he was well known and he could convene, which was relatively important for the role.
“Without that sort of figure, it's much harder to have that focus.”
Bell further notes that it is instructive to compare the clean power mission with the others set by Starmer, all of which dissolved quite quickly. Stark’s experience of running the CCC and civil service experience meant that he understood both the technical advice that the unit was providing and how to push it through government, says Sentence.
Agreeing, Brazier Tope says: “[Stark] was given complete free rein on how you deliver this and that's what he's done. He identified the things that needed fixing, he set the scope for the number of projects that needed consent and within each allocation round.
“I don't think that would have happened if it was only down to the civil service because you need somebody from the outside to come in with a fresh mandate from a minister and be unafraid of giving what are otherwise quite difficult answers.”
Stark, who is understood to have been offered other senior posts within government, will be a “big loss”, says Matthew: “He's so expert and so respected.
“The concern now is that by losing Chris and with the reprioritisation within the department, some of those core technical reforms which are required and the level of deep coordination required across government to make this work will suffer as a result.
“It has to be a worry that the secretary of state's right-hand man on the mission is not there. It wasn't just he had the expertise but he had the authority.”
There are question marks now over what happens with the roles of the Clean Power 2030 commissioners, including recently appointed flexibility tsar Catherine McClay, says Honan: “We need clarity on what it means for the commitment to Clean Power 2030 because so many policy decisions have come about as a result of it. We need to understand what the impact of these changes are.”
While many of the building blocks of clean power are there in terms of generation, the same is not true for the network build out, says Ralston, who suggests that the unit could have moved on to tackle grid delays.
More broadly though, if the government is now downplaying the 2030 target, it needs a fresh strategy, says Sentence: “If we're going to quietly stop talking about Clean Power 2030 as much, then we need to have the alternative organising principle around, in my view, electrification and affordability that go hand in hand. With that, there needs to be some kind of strategy that pulls this together that government can run at for the next two years.”
Noting that the absence such an over-arching strategy makes more likely short-term cuts, such as those being mooted to the Boiler Upgrade Scheme in next week’s Budget, she says: “Don't quietly stop talking about it [clean power] without filling the space.”
*For the record, those five missions were: Kickstart economic growth; Make Britain a clean energy superpower; Take back our streets; Break down barriers to opportunity; Build an NHS fit for the future.
