Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else (20 page)

‘I was asked which room I wanted, and whether I needed anything. I remember asking for a whiteboard, and being told I wouldn't need one. I asked for a bookcase and they said: “Minister, if there are any books you want to read, you've got civil servants now, just get one of them to read the book and they'll give you a précis.” I didn't understand that “Is there anything you need?” was code for “What do you want in your drinks cabinet?” ' He asked the civil servants if they would draw up a report on the new energy markets and fuel poverty. ‘I was told fuel poverty was not a concept recognised in the department; it was the concern of the Department of Social Security.'

Battle was well aware of the unfairness of the French takeover, but was under the impression that Littlechild was happy to see it go ahead. The civil servants who might have told him otherwise don't seem to have made a fuss about it; the DTI's permanent
secretary at the time, Michael Scholar, told me in an email that the EDF takeover ‘was not in the department a cause célèbre'.

Battle now regrets not challenging Littlechild and the other regulators. ‘The regulator was completely fixed on price mechanism as the be all and end all, and opening up to new entrants. On paper it sounded fine. But in the real global economy, we couldn't buy a French power station, and they could buy ours. We didn't get a grip on the regulators. We left the framework to them. We should have changed the remit. We were too cautious and nervous about questioning the market. Why was it that we had to lose our nationalised industries in order to hand them over to nationalised industries from other countries? They could buy into us, but we couldn't buy into them. The French said they wanted to open up their markets but they never did.'

The DTI asked Brussels to let Britain's own competition authorities decide on the EDF bid. The European competition commissioner, the late Karel van Miert, refused, and soon afterwards issued an eight-page judgment clearing the EDF takeover. Ignoring EDF's monopoly in France, he focused instead on the cross-Channel cable through which EDF already sold Britain a relatively small amount of power. Such a piddling market share, he concluded, hardly threatened dominance. It was as if UEFA had been asked to consider the fairness of a French football team becoming the twenty-first member of the Premier League and, after scrupulous examination of the relative strengths of the existing twenty English teams, announced that the French would have no special advantage playing in England, ignoring the detail that when the English teams visited the French side at home, the French goal was boarded up with plywood. ‘The DTI,' Helm writes,

I arranged to meet some of the agents of the Robin Hood group, L'Association des Robins de Bois – a clandestine network of French subversives working within EDF on the company's home territory – in Montbéliard, in Franche-Comté, where the Peugeot family began making things for sale, starting with coffee mills and bicycles in the nineteenth century. While I waited for my contact outside the railway station, a freight train clanked past bearing a seemingly infinite number of new Peugeots. Here was France's well-lubricated machine a-running, its state-planned network of nuclear reactors pouring out cheap, low-carbon electricity to power world-renowned Franche-Comté companies like Peugeot and Alstom, and to power the network of state-planned
trains à grande vitesse
that connects the country. ‘Bienvenue à Belfort Montbéliard – Territoire d'énergies' reads a poster at the TGV station.

But Peugeot is struggling to compete at home and abroad; France's fifty-eight nuclear reactors, all built between 1971 and 1991, are coming to the end of their working lives, with no certainty as to how they will be replaced; and the new Belfort-Montbéliard TGV station, which opened last year, deposits arriving passengers in the middle of the countryside, several miles away from both Belfort and Montbéliard. As for cheap electricity, it is no use, if you are French, knowing that EDF electricity is cheaper in France than EDF electricity in Britain (which it is) if you can't afford it.

My Robin Hood contact, P, had worked directly for EDF for fifteen years, then spent another fifteen in the CGT union, still, under the French system, on the EDF payroll. Over lunch, he explained the Robin Hood group: a loose association of electrical engineers and co-ordinators who step in when EDF managers
order a customer to be cut off for non-payment. In certain cases, if they can't help the customer any other way, a Robin Hood EDF engineer will return to the property and clandestinely, illegally reconnect the supply. Five years ago EDF electricians discovered that some government officials whose work was tied to the company were getting electricity for nothing. They promptly disconnected them. ‘That was the birth of Robin Hood,' said P.

The group does what it can to protect its members and impoverished EDF customers from prosecution – making sure the reconnecting engineer is not the same as the disconnecting engineer, and that the meter never stops running, so that the bill continues to rise, at least nominally. Where possible they call in social services to help the customer rather than cut them off, or invent a reason not to do the job.

‘We want an engineer to have the right to refuse to cut somebody off,' P said. ‘It used to be easier to come up with excuses not to do it, because there weren't so many jobs. Now one engineer's doing ten disconnections a day, you can't refuse them all.' It was dangerous work, he explained. ‘You need to know how to do it. If you make a mistake when you try to restore electricity, you're dead. If you create a short circuit you can blow your head off. You need special gloves, a special mask, a visor.'

Rather than use the tactic EDF and other electricity firms have adopted in Britain – replacing non-payers' meters with a meter requiring power to be paid for in advance – the homeland EDF will sometimes install a ‘trickle meter', rationing poor customers to a thousand watts at a time. ‘A thousand watts. It's too little,' P said. ‘You can't live with that. If you have the light on in the evening, the TV and the washing machine, that's it.'

P described the Robin Hood group's activities as ‘a legitimate act of resistance', echoing the origins of EDF in the undercover planning for postwar France carried out by the National Council of the Resistance during the Occupation. At the CGT's headquarters in Paris, in a modern brick building hollowed out by a vast atrium, I found the same description of France's electricity
supply as a part of
la patrie
that had somehow been taken over by outside forces. ‘For us,' Denis Cohen, the communist head of the CGT until 2003, told me, ‘energy is like culture; it's not a private good.'

It was puzzling. From this side of the English Channel, it had seemed clear enough: although some shares in EDF have been sold, and the management has been given a measure of commercial freedom, EDF looked like a state company, owned, controlled and supported by the French state, subject to French political control, and thus to the French electorate. It has taken over a large chunk of the British electrical system, though EDF doesn't answer to me and my fellow voters. Yet ordinary French people don't seem to feel it is under their control, either. My efforts to arrange an interview with the company's supposed owners, the French state, in the form of the Agence des participations de l'État, were rebuffed. As a last resort I turned up unannounced at the APE's headquarters in the government offices in Bercy, a forbidding building resembling a cliff face of beige stone and tinted glass. I was shown the door.

‘It's a funny company,' Thibaut Madelin, energy correspondent of
Les Echos
, told me of EDF. ‘Obviously it's a state-owned company, and you can argue it's controlled by the government, and the union plays a big role, but I think the real power is within EDF. I've covered energy for four years and I've found no one can actually challenge it. The civil service and the regulator try somehow to control EDF but they can't. It's very hard to define where the power comes from.'

One spring morning I took the train from London, north through Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, to Nottinghamshire. The trackside was sprinkled with blackthorn blossom and when the sun flashed between the rainclouds the fields of rape flowers shone a dizzy yellow. Just before Newark-on-Trent the track began to cross lines of six-armed National Grid pylons, heaving their cables over the sheep and hedgerows like devas converging
on a sacred site. We passed between Sherwood Forest and the River Trent and clusters of steam-headed cooling towers rose on the horizon, signalling the approach to England's great electric estate.

The five coal-fired power stations that spread out in an arc along the Aire and Trent valleys have been there since I was a boy: the squat towers, seen from the window of express trains hurrying between London and Scotland, seem as natural in the landscape as flat green fields and comfortable houses of dark red brick. Most of them were built by the CEGB in the 1960s, in the heyday of state planning, to use local coal. The quintet of West Burton, Cottam, Drax, Eggborough and Ferrybridge still run. With their turbines spinning at full tilt, they can make a fifth of the electricity Britain needs on a cold winter's day.

Inside the noisy room at Cottam that houses four 164-foot high boilers, Stephen Rawlinson, the plant's mechanical maintenance manager, beckoned me up a set of metal steps and opened a tiny hatch. We were like insects under the grate of a coal fire, sparks and orange-hot cinders the size of my head shooting into heaps of ash. Looking up, I saw the inferno itself, a vast fireball coiling and erupting, fed by jets of pulverised coal, ground finer than talcum powder in enormous rotating drums filled with steel balls. Here was the elemental fury behind the green charging light and the whine of the washing machine.

Cottam coal station (there's also a gas station, owned by E.ON, on the same site) was privatised in 1991 and bought by EDF in 2000. When I asked the predominantly middle-aged engineers how they felt about working for the French, they told me their first loyalty was to the power station itself. But beyond that, working for EDF reminded them of the old British public service they started out in. ‘It's very much along the lines of the CEGB as we knew it years ago – very structured procedurally, which is a good thing to have,' said Dave Owen, a boiler engineer. He took me inside a boiler that had been shut down for cleaning. The mass of hot dust had been vacuumed out but every
surface was still covered in brown powder. A gut-tangle of tubes and steam condensers at the top resolved itself into a vertiginous shaft lined with a delicate layer of tightly packed tubes that parted at the base to take coal from the feeders.

‘I don't mind it going to other countries, but I believe there should be an engineering base in the UK,' Owen said. ‘As a country we're losing out, from engineers who design to people who maintain.'

Boyd Johnson, who looks after the mass of machinery – itself the size of a large factory – that strips polluting sulphur from the gas given off by the burning coal, said that Powergen, the company that inherited Cottam from the CEGB, hadn't seemed committed to the future: it never invested in the full anti-pollution gear. EDF was different. ‘As engineers, we're all about investment in the kit.' Being with EDF, he said, was ‘like going back to the CEGB, but a little bit crisper.' France, to be sure, had different priorities, but ‘at the end of the day, the French are investing. OK, you could say that in the future, when all the nuclears are built, they'll get quite a large say in how the industry is run. But then we have government regulators.'

Chris Wild, in charge of milling the coal into powder, showed me the troughs where conveyor belts deliver the raw mined nuggets into the plant. I asked where the coal came from. The last deep mine in Nottinghamshire, Thoresby, is twenty miles away. ‘We have such a varied diet,' he said. ‘I think this is from Kentucky.' Wild was among the last batch of apprentices taken on by the CEGB before it was broken up and sold. ‘It doesn't matter,' he said. ‘I don't think “My boss is wearing EDF overalls” if he rings up at two in the morning and says some bit of kit's broken down.'

Cottam operates with hundreds fewer staff than it did in the CEGB days and no apparent problems. ‘If this downsizing had been done under the auspices of the CEGB, would it have worked?' Wild asked. ‘How do you measure the loss of such things as the Hams Hall workshops and the apprentice
workshops at Burton on Trent, or the CEGB engineering programme? It makes you wonder if it could have remained as a privatised, streamlined CEGB. Would it have been better?'

The cumulative effects of Littlechild's RPI-X regime, two decades' idealisation of shareholder capitalism, and the relentless promotion of the notion that it is socially acceptable for senior managers to be motivated by nothing other than a desire for personal enrichment, have left the electricity system on which Britain relies worn out. A fifth of the British power stations running today are due to close by the 2020s, and the government wants some mix of new nuclear, wind and gas, together with a smattering of coal and a rejig of the Grid, to make good the shortfall. In 2012 one government minister said the figure of £110 billion often bandied about for how much this would cost was only the beginning.

The new imperative to be good world citizens by burning less fossil fuel makes matters harder. Our nuclear power stations are clapped out, our coal and oil stations are greenhouse gas factories, and since we've burned through most of our own North Sea gas reserves we've become reliant on shiploads of liquefied gas from Qatar, routed through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran promises to close if foreign powers give it trouble. Onshore wind farms are unpopular with rural Tories; offshore wind farms are expensive and far from the Grid, and besides, wind power needs to be backed up with alternatives, since the wind doesn't blow all the time.