They Asked the Public — But the Policy Had Already Been Decided

The Energy Security and Net Zero Committee wanted to know how to build support for the energy transition.

What it received instead was a warning about what happens when consultation begins with the answer already assumed.

On 17 September 2026, the House of Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Committee published its report Zero sum game: How the UK can reframe the energy transition. It is the culmination of an inquiry officially entitled “Building support for the energy transition.”

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/55056/documents/305189/default/

That title matters.

The inquiry was not primarily established to ask whether the Government’s proposed energy transition was technically deliverable, economically justified, affordable at system level, compatible with existing grid constraints, or necessarily the best route to energy security. The Committee’s own description said the Government’s ability to change how energy is generated and used would depend on being able to “bring people along with it”, and that the inquiry would assess whether Government was communicating effectively so that the public understood the transition’s objectives and benefits.

In other words, the direction of travel was already largely embedded in the question.
The fascinating thing about the final report is that the public engagement exercise did not behave as expected.
People challenged the premise.
And, to the Committee’s credit, some of those objections have now made it into the Parliamentary record.
A consultation about how , rather than whether

The Annex describes a public engagement event involving 21 people selected from respondents to two contrasting Parliamentary petitions. Participants were chosen to reflect different perspectives and were divided between five roundtables.

But look carefully at how the purpose of the exercise was defined.
The Committee says the event was designed to understand public perceptions of the energy transition and how people responded to Government communication. Participants were presented with information and the Committee wanted to explore whether their opinions changed afterwards.

There is nothing inherently improper about doing that.
But it is very different from beginning with the open question:
What energy system should Britain actually build?
That question would require examination of generation, firm capacity, grid capability, system balancing, infrastructure delivery dates, consumer costs, land requirements, security of supply, supply chains and alternative pathways.
Instead, the transition itself was largely the starting proposition.

One participant’s formal response, now published in the Annex, identified precisely this problem.

The participant argued that the session was not experienced as a genuinely neutral, open-ended evidence-gathering exercise, because the structure of the discussion and the questions were aligned around an existing policy direction.

That criticism becomes even more important on the following page.
The participant specifically identified deliverability, grid constraints, system risk, cost exposure and infrastructure timescales as fundamental issues which were not treated as open questions about the strategy but instead as secondary implementation problems.

That distinction goes to the heart of the problem.
If you assume the strategy first and then ask the public how it should be communicated or implemented, you are not testing the strategy itself.
You are testing how successfully it can be sold.

And then something inconvenient happened
Despite that structure, the participants did not simply converge on the expected position.

The Committee itself admits this.
Its report says that its “key takeaway” from the exercise was that providing additional information did not move participants towards consensus. Instead, it appeared to further polarise opinion, with little common ground over trusted information, accepted facts or organisations considered reliable.

That is perhaps one of the most important findings in the whole report.
Because it challenges the assumption that resistance to energy policy is simply an information deficit.
People were given information.
Some remained unconvinced.
And their reasons were not confined to slogans or social-media arguments.

The Annex records participants raising the financial cost of the transition, the impact of infrastructure on rural communities, grid capacity, agricultural land being used for solar, imported food, replacement costs for older wind farms, EVs, heat pumps, North Sea production, dependence on imported renewable supply-chain materials and reliance on China.

Those are substantive policy questions.
They deserve substantive answers.
“Be open and upfront about costs”
Perhaps the strongest lesson from the participants is that public trust cannot simply be repaired with better communications.

The Annex records a view that distrust develops when what is published differs from what people believe they are experiencing in reality.

Participants asked for the “full picture” and argued that Government should be “open and upfront about costs”, rather than emphasising benefits while failing to discuss negatives.

That is not an argument against information.
It is an argument for more information.
There is an important difference.

Other participants took the opposite view. Some argued that the presentations did not adequately include the costs of not transitioning and that a fair comparison should examine the net cost of action against inaction.

That disagreement is useful.
It tells us what a genuinely rigorous public debate ought to look like.
Put both cases on the table.
Show the infrastructure.
Show the costs.
Show the assumptions.
Show the alternatives.
Show the consequences of action and inaction.
Then allow people to scrutinise them.
Rural Britain forced its way into the discussion
The Annex also records something that risks being lost when energy policy is reduced to national percentages and gigawatts.
People live where this infrastructure is being constructed.
Some participants supported rooftop solar while expressing concern about large-scale development on agricultural land and its implications for food production. Others questioned whether rural communities were being required to bear a disproportionate share of the renewable infrastructure rollout.

A further participant response said the original summary had understated the strength of feeling expressed.
That response describes substantial concern over large-scale solar farms, their effects on communities, heritage and biodiversity, and the perceived weakening of local democratic influence where schemes proceed through the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects regime.

Another participant went further, describing the draft summary as a “sanitised” interpretation which, in that participant’s view, gave insufficient weight to those questioning the pace and wisdom of the current strategy and failed adequately to convey the anger felt in some rural communities.

These comments do not prove that every participant shared those views.
Indeed, the Annex contains strong contributions from participants supporting urgent climate action as well. One participant specifically warned that uneven participation and summarisation could give minority opinions disproportionate prominence, reporting that three of four people at their particular table supported the urgency of the transition and trusted institutions such as the CCC and IPCC.

That evidence matters too.
But that is precisely the point.
There was real disagreement.
It should not be flattened into a communications problem.
Yet the main report returns to communications

Here lies the contradiction.

Having discovered that additional information could actually deepen divisions, the Committee nevertheless places considerable emphasis on improved communication, trusted messengers and the way the transition is presented.

Its recommendations include developing a cross-government communications strategy emphasising health, economics, security and social benefits, and reducing official reliance on the phrase “net zero”.

The report also proposes a stronger role for national academies and asks Government to consider whether Ofcom needs greater powers and resources in relation to misleading information concerning the energy transition.

Meanwhile, the Committee’s central conclusion states that the question is not whether Britain makes the transition but

“how quickly and how fairly.”

That sentence tells us a great deal.
The “whether” has effectively been closed.
But participants were still raising questions that belong squarely inside it.
Is the infrastructure deliverable on the timetable proposed?
What happens where the transmission network is constrained?
What is the full system cost?
What firm generation is required?
What are the consequences for agricultural land?
How dependent will Britain become on imported equipment and materials?
What happens to communities hosting nationally significant infrastructure?

Those are not communication problems.
They are policy questions.

The most important sentence in the Annex
One participant captured the underlying concern in a sentence that deserves far more attention than it is likely to receive.

Without greater transparency about assumptions, unresolved risks and the framing of the exercise, the participant warned that the process risked being understood as:

“policy-based evidence making, rather than evidence-based policy making.”


That is the real story buried in this report.

A Parliamentary Committee began an inquiry explicitly concerned with building support for an energy transition whose broad direction was already assumed. It brought members of the public into Parliament, presented information and explored whether attitudes changed.

But members of that public did something extremely valuable.

They challenged the starting assumptions.
Some supported the transition strongly. Others questioned it profoundly. Some wanted faster action. Others wanted adaptation, nuclear power, domestic gas, greater attention to system costs, protection of agricultural land or a fundamentally different balance of technologies.
And despite a process designed around discussing how the transition should proceed, those disagreements could not be made to disappear.

The Annex preserves them.
That may ultimately be one of the most useful outcomes of the entire exercise.
Public engagement should not mean discovering better words with which to persuade people to accept a policy already decided.

At its strongest, public engagement allows ordinary people to ask the question policymakers sometimes find most uncomfortable:

What if the assumptions themselves need testing?

The participants asked that question.
And now, importantly, Parliament has published it.

Shane Oxer.   Campaigner for fairer and affordable energy