Coalition energy secretary Ed Davey says Tories would have accepted a much higher price as they were ‘gagging for nuclear’

The deal to provide a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point would have cost even more if George Osborne had had his way, the former energy secretary Ed Davey has said.

The Lib Dem former member of the coalition cabinet said the £18bn plan to build Hinkley Point C represented a good deal, and claimed the cost would have been higher without his involvement.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “We need lots of low-carbon electricity in the future. And I negotiated a good deal. My Conservative colleagues would have shaken at a much higher price.”



Davey claimed Osborne was so keen to strike a deal, particularly one involving Chinese investment, that he would have agreed to pay more.

We are pro-nuclear, but Hinkley C must be scrapped Read more

He said: “They were gagging for nuclear. George Osborne in particular was wanting to have Chinese investment, big infrastructure projects to show off to the Tory backbenchers. It was me saying I’m going to walk away from this deal if we don’t do what we promised parliament, and that meant we had to get the price down to below £90 per megawatt hour, which I did.”



The government disputes Davey’s account of events. A government source told the Times that Conservative ministers lost faith in Davey’s negotiating skills and insisted on Treasury involvement in the deal.

But Davey pointed out that negotiations in 2013 were led by his permanent secretary at the energy department. He said: “My permanent secretary was the person I appointed to run it, and he worked with the Treasury because the Treasury were involved. But I was the one who was prepared to walk away.”

Davey defended the cost of the deal, which guarantees the French operator EDF almost three times the current wholesale energy price.

On Monday, the British and French governments said Hinkley Point C was still on track despite the resignations of EDF’s finance director and the project’s director. French nuclear workers’ unions have called for EDF to delay the deal.

Davey said: “If it is such a bad deal, why are EDF not signing up straight away?”

He added: “The thing I’m really proud about in this deal is that if it isn’t built we won’t pay anything. All the risk has been transferred to EDF and we only start paying in 2025 if it is built.

“It is really important when you make decisions [that] you force whoever is producing the power to pay for their pollution. If gas was paying a carbon tax, the current price will be much higher.”

Davey criticised the government’s record on renewable energy since the end of the coalition. He said: “The key thing that I did was to ensure that we had a diverse approach to energy. What the Conservatives are doing so badly is by destroying solar power, destroying on-shore wind, not proceeding with tidal power, ending the carbon capture and storage programme, they are putting Britain’s future energy security at risk.”