Draft Energy Bill criticisms remain to be answered, says economist

According to a paper released by Oxford University economist Dieter Helm on Thursday 21 September the government's Electricity Market Reform proposals are "incoherent" and unnecessarily "complex". Helm said recent efforts by energy and climate change secretary Ed Davey to defend the draft Energy Bill had been "anything but convincing", and had demonstrated his "economic illiteracy". Helm said the bill not only contained complex individual parts but the interactions between the different policies added further complexity. The paper queried how Davey could know the bill would create up to 250,000 jobs or that it would lower household bills by 4%, and believed the MP had displayed a "very deep failure to understand what competition is all about".
Dieter Helm