Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 30TH AUGUST - 5TH SEPTEMBER 2019 | 7 Interview A lan Simpson and Jeremy Corbyn go back a very long way. In the early 1990s the two were dissi- dent MPs on Labour's backbenches. Along with shadow chancellor John McDonnell, they were members of the hard le€ wing Campaign group of MPs that was deeply out of step with then party leader Tony Blair. Simpson became a lodger in Corbyn's Islington home when he moved down to the capital a€er winning the Nottingham South constituency for Labour in the 1992 general election. The now opposition leader didn't charge rent, though, and Simpson contributed instead by reading bedtime stories to Corbyn's young children. Fast-forward more than 25 years and one of those chil- dren, Sebastian, now works for McDonnell. Meanwhile, Simpson is advising his old Campaign comrade on one of the latter's current causes – sustainable economics. It means that even though he stopped being an MP nine years ago, to focus on environmental issues, the 70-year-old has more influence than ever. And Simpson, who says he still has a weekly breakfast meeting with Corbyn, has ruffled feathers among some of Labour's union backers. With the country looking set to head towards a gen- eral election before the end of this year, it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine that Simpson could be advising a prime minister Corbyn on energy and environmental issues by Christmas. For the time being, though, fresh off the train from Nottingham at St Pancras on an unseasonably cool sum- mer's morning, he is meeting Utility Week. Simpson's interest in energy and the environment is long-standing, which during his parliamentary career culminated in him tabling an amendment to legislation that paved the way for the introduction of FITs (feed-in tariffs) under the last Labour government. When we meet, the self-styled "recovering MP" is still riled about the abolition of FITs. He describes the gov- ernment's proposals for a Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) as a "get out of jail card" for the big generators, who he believes continue to have too big a hand in shaping UK energy policy. "In the UK we seem to be caught up in knee-jerk solutions that try to throw more lifelines to yesterday's energy sector than tomorrow's," he says. "In reality, it is much more about the destruction and undermining of the shi€ to clean and democratic energy systems that you are seeing much more widely elsewhere in Europe and in large parts of north America." Simpson, whose accent bears the hallmark of his Merseyside birthplace despite him spending the bulk of his adult life in Nottingham and Westminster, dismisses the SEG as a "lick and promise" rather than a "serious" attempt to establish a fair payment regime to replace the FIT. While acknowledging that the FIT system was "rough and ready", he argues that it wasn't "overly generous" to individual generators and was a "good deal" for National Grid. Ex-chancellor George Osborne's decision to set cash limits inhibited the mass adoption of small-scale renew- ables, which would have made it easier for the poorest in society to benefit from cheaper electricity, Simpson says. Photo: Picfair

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