The climate quango empire will keep growing until cheap matters more than ideology

Net Zero has generated an ever-larger bureaucratic apparatus operating at arm’s length from ministers, insulated from accountability and immune to the question of whether it is actually working, says Anne Strickland

Ed Miliband frequently claims that net zero is the economic opportunity of the century. A theory that collapses the moment you open your energy bill. 

While households have watched their energy costs climb and businesses have been ground down by the highest tax burden in decades, Britain’s energy quango state has been doing rather well for itself. Recent TaxPayers’ Alliance research tracks four of the biggest energy quangos between 2015-16 and 2024-25: Ofgem, the Climate Change Committee, the Low Carbon Contracts Company and the North Sea Transition Authority. The story is the same across all four: more staff, higher costs, ballooning budgets. The one thing conspicuously absent from the picture is any benefit to the taxpayers funding it all. 

Take Ofgem. Britain’s energy regulator has seen expenditure rise by 237 per cent, from £77m to £260m. Its headcount more than doubled, from 907 staff to 2,276, making it one of the largest energy regulators in Europe. Staff costs rose by over £100m. In 2023, Ofgem was handed a statutory net zero duty requiring it to now juggle consumer protection, energy security and decarbonisation. On the first of those, results have been particularly poor. British households now pay some of the highest energy bills in Europe. 

Then there is the Low Carbon Contracts Company, a body most people have never heard of, which administers Britain’s multibillion-pound subsidy scheme for renewable energy generators. Its headcount has risen 382 per cent and costs have nearly tripled. It now manages over 560 subsidy contracts, with costs expected to more than double again by 2029 as more of Miliband’s commissioned projects come online. It is wholly owned by the energy secretary and operates almost entirely out of public view. When it fails, there is no clear line of accountability back to the voter. The Climate Change Committee’s income has doubled and its staffing costs have risen by 121 per cent. Even the North Sea Transition Authority, which is largely funded by industry rather than taxpayers, has seen its remit steadily expand.

Miliband promised this agenda would save households £300 a year but has not delivered that. Nor did the Conservatives who built most of the quangocracy before him. What both parties have delivered is an ever-larger bureaucratic apparatus operating at arm’s length from ministers, insulated from accountability and immune to the question of whether it is actually working. 

That question matters because the answer, on a global scale, is almost certainly no. The UK accounts for under one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Global emissions from fossil fuels hit a record high in 2025. The quango empire Miliband has strengthened at such cost to consumers is operating on the assumption that Britain can set an example the rest of the world will follow.

Tony Blair, who knows a thing or two about ambitious government programmes, recently called net zero a “quixotic fantasy” and pointed out that Xi Jinping is not sitting in Beijing reconsidering Chinese energy policy based on what Britain does. Love him or hate him, he is right. 

Rather than pause to ask whether any of this is justified, the government is pressing ahead with more of the same. The King’s Speech 2026 announced yet another new energy quango while handing existing bodies additional powers and responsibilities. Great British Energy, a publicly owned energy company established last year, adds another layer to an already crowded field. The bureaucracy is still being actively built, even as the strategy underpinning it faces growing scepticism from the public, from business and now from a former Labour prime minister. 

But the quangos will keep growing until someone decides that cheaper energy matters more than net zero ideology. That moment cannot come soon enough.