This page will be updated as the Parties publish their General Election Manifestos.
The Labour Party
One of the five missions set out by the Labour Party over the last year is to make Britain a clean energy superpower. In 2023, the Party published its Local Power Plan, which set out some of its underlying policy proposals to help it achieve this goal. It included a pledge to support community energy to scale up by offering up to £400 million per year in low interest loans for community projects, alongside £600 million per year of funding for local authorities to support local power.
In 2021, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced plans to spend an extra £28bn per year on climate investment, with the figure becoming symbolic of the party’s broader commitment to climate action. Following the short premiership of Liz Truss and the Kwasi Kwarteng mini-budget and increased inflation the financial situation looked very different and the party leadership was reluctant to have a headline figure on which they could be attacked during an election. They have now dropped the £28 billion figure altogether. They are still very much committed to achieve as much as is possible and we are assured that the commitments to invest in communities and local authorities are safe and remain a top priority. Sadly the commitment on retrofit has gone from 19m homes to 'millions of homes'.
If implemented with sufficient funding, the Local Power Plan could drastically increase the capacity of the sector to shape Britain’s energy transformation and could enable the sector to achieve our 2030 Vision of growing 12-20 fold.
Please contact your local Labour candidate to impress upon them how much community energy has to offer in achieving their mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower and that they must prioritise implementing the Local Power Plan if they win the general election.
The Conservative Party
In 2023, the Conservative government introduced the Community Energy Fund (CEF). Worth £10m up to March 2025, the fund is designed to support feasibility and development for community energy projects. Before the CEF was announced, the community energy sector had not had any bespoke funding since the closure of the Rural Community Energy Fund (RCEF) in 2022. While a boost for the sector, the CEF offers significantly less funding than previous schemes and by itself will not facilitate the levels of growth in the sector enabled by policies such as feed-in tariffs, which were cut in 2016 and closed in 2019.
The government is currently consulting on the barriers facing the community energy sector, most of them created during the term of the Conservative government since 2015. It also pledged to report on progress towards overcoming these barriers annually.
As of May 2024, the Conservative Party has not made any further commitments to support the community energy sector.
If your local Conservative candidate could win at the General Election please contact them to urge them advocate that community energy be supported by a manifesto pledge ideally matching Labour's but at least for a Community Energy Fund #2 that enables the sector to grow exponentially again. Please emphasise how important this is to local regeneration, energy resilience and net zero. You could tell them about the potential for community energy to effectively address fuel poverty. Bristol University researchers have calculated that for every pound spent on fuel poverty alleviation by two community organisations (SELCE and Energise Sussex Coast) had a social return on investment of at least £9. Supporting community energy represents a pragmatic and effective way to support their constituents.
The Liberal Democrats
At their 2023 Conference, the Liberal Democrats passed a policy paper which can be seen as a precursor to their general election manifesto. ‘For a Fair Deal’ covered a wide range of issues and pledged to ‘promote community energy’. However, no further detail on how they would go about this was provided.
Their Leader Ed Davey served as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change for the coalition government between 2012 and 2015. In this role, he published the government’s Community Energy Strategy, which supported substantial growth for the sector before funding cuts by the Conservative government after 2015 eventually put the brakes on. He has pledged that his party's policies will be the most radical on net zero.
If you get the chance to speak to your local Lib Dem MP or candidate, you could ask them to set out a more detailed and ambitious plan for community energy, using Labour’s Local Power Plan as the benchmark to beat. ‘Community’ and ‘Environmentalism’ are two of the party’s stated core values and alongside their leader’s record of working with the sector, the party should be comfortable going further in its support for community energy.