Prime Minister Andy Burnham has announced almost £30m in funding for a sweeping community energy programme, marking the most significant investment of its kind ever attempted in Britain. The initiative, known as People’s Power, will allow villages, towns and cities across all four nations of the UK to generate, own and profit from their own clean electricity supplies.
A New Model of Local Ownership
The funding will support projects ranging from solar panels installed on public buildings such as libraries, to community-owned wind farms and small-scale hydro schemes on local rivers. Crucially, every council and community group that receives backing will hold at least a partial stake in the renewable assets built with their name.
This is not simply a matter of hosting infrastructure on council land. Communities will retain a share of the revenue generated, ensuring that the economic benefits of the green transition remain close to home. Burnham was clear that the model draws on a principle he championed as mayor of Greater Manchester, where buses were brought back under public control, fares capped and the fleet progressively cleaned up. The result, he argued, was a transport system built around the people who depend on it — and the same philosophy is now being applied to energy.
Climate Crisis Demands Action, Not Abstraction
The prime minister framed the announcement against the backdrop of the hottest summer ever recorded in the UK, pointing to nurses collapsing on hospital wards during punishing heatwaves and bus drivers labouring in temperatures reaching 40C. Wildfires destroyed homes and left families with nothing, while meteorologists forecast yet more extreme weather in the months to come.
Burnham insisted the climate crisis is no longer a distant prospect on the horizon. It is an immediate reality affecting every corner of the country. He said the British public fully grasps the gravity of global heating and is eager to play a constructive role in addressing it, rather than being left on the sidelines.
The scale of the ambition should not be understated. Today’s £30m injection represents the first tranche of a £1bn Great British Energy programme, which the government intends to expand over time into more than 1,000 People’s Power projects nationwide. It is a vast undertaking and one that will require sustained political will across future parliaments.
Affordability and the Path to Net Zero
Community energy, the government argues, is the most durable route to bringing down household bills in the long term. Producing more clean, renewable electricity on British soil reduces dependence on imported fossil fuels and insulates consumers from volatile global markets.
This latest move complements other measures aimed at easing the cost of living. From the beginning of October, VAT will be removed from household electricity bills, offering families immediate relief. But Downing Street is adamant that such short-term interventions, however welcome, cannot substitute for a fundamental shift toward domestic energy generation.
Burnham reaffirmed his determination to meet Labour’s manifesto commitment to reach net zero by 2050, positioning the green transition as an opportunity to reindustrialise the nation. He drew a sharp contrast between two approaches: the traditional Whitehall route of imposing costly regulations and handing rewards to private firms, or an alternative path that creates jobs, lowers energy costs and hands genuine power back to local people.
Why it Matters
This programme represents a fundamental rethinking of how Britain should approach its energy future. If executed at the scale promised, it could reshape the relationship between citizens and the infrastructure that powers their daily lives, embedding economic ownership at the grassroots rather than concentrating it in the hands of a few large providers. The stakes are high: success would demonstrate that the climate response can be both locally empowering and economically sensible, while failure to deliver on such an ambitious target could deepen public scepticism about the viability of the net zero transition. With energy costs still a dominant concern for millions of households, the government has placed a significant portion of its credibility on the claim that community-driven generation can deliver both environmental progress and tangible financial benefit.
