Can I first of all very much commend the work that Simon has done in this area on energy, and also the work the various parties on the various committees have looked so much at on the issue of community energy? This is an issue that isn't going to go away, and we are on a path where we will inevitably end up with community energy and the renationalisation or the re-public ownership, in whatever form, of energy, as we will with the other public services. My contribution, to some extent, is to talk about this within the concept of public ownership, because without public ownership there isn't public accountability of what the key services are that we all depend on that are essential to life.

I think what is very, very clear is that privatisation in all the areas of public service has been an absolute disaster. It's been a mechanism for the legalised mugging and robbery of members of the public. I'm not aware of any public service—and I'm a user of all the public services, as we all are—. I look around to find any of those public services—water, gas, electricity, even transport—and say, 'To what extent am I any better off as a result of privatisation?' I'm faced, as everyone else is, with systems of payment for energy and public services that I don't understand. I can't work out what they actually mean to me. I can certainly not see that I'm any better off. What's very, very clear is that in all our public services, and energy being an absolutely fundamental one of them, there is a need for a new approach to public ownership in whatever form, whether it would be not-for-profit, whether it would be co-operative or whatever.

The legacy of what the Tories have delivered us in terms of privatisation has actually resulted in some quite remarkable political changes. In terms of energy, 77 per cent of the population of the UK now want to return to public ownership of energy. They are sick to death of the system of confusion, the lack of accountability, never knowing who's in control, who is in charge. And maybe that was always part of the purpose of privatisation: to take away the route to, actually, at the end of the day, being able to hold public accountability, and maybe it is also an explanation as to why there has been such disillusionment in politics, because no longer are you able to say who you hold to account for those key services. 

Five point one per cent of energy only is renewable in the UK. Real-term prices are 10 to 20 per cent higher due to privatisation in energy, 10 per cent live in fuel poverty, and public ownership would save an estimated £3.2 billion per annum, which roughly offsets against the actual profits that are extracted out of the industry on a year by year basis. 

Countries are now returning to the concept of democratisation of public services. Germany's now moving back to a system of 15 per cent public co-op community ownership. In doing so, I think the area that we probably do need to explore much, much further is how this needs to fit within a UK-wide strategy in terms of the grid, and in terms of the actual production of energy, as well as the distribution and supply.

You have to ask why the Tories have consistently resisted and opposed the re-ownership, the re-democratisation of energy, water and so on. Well, we know it's because, for example, solely in the energy sector alone, David Cameron received £2.6 million in donations from the energy industry, and before that general election received £3.4 million. So, clearly, the energy companies know where their own vested interests lie in terms of protecting the privatisation. Nine senior Tories had second jobs on boards of directors or as consultants of the energy companies, so the whole system has been corrupt and incestuous. 

That is why it actually has to happen. We see the same with water, raised this week at the GMB conference. The bosses of the five or six main water companies are paying themselves £58 million a year in salaries, a 40 per cent increase in pay over a period of several years—the chief executive of Severn Trent Water, £2.45 million; United Utilities, £2.3 million—and all of these are companies that make significant donations to the Conservative Party. 

We see again what's happening within the NHS—£4.1 billion privatisation budget of the NHS in 2009-10, which I don't agree with, but is now £8.7 billion. Theresa May couldn't even answer that statistic. We look again at the system with the railways, the buses, telecomms, postal services and housing. So, you're heading in exactly the right direction. I think this is a road we have to go down, and I take some comfort from reading out a quote from The Spectator, a Tory-supporting magazine, which says that 

'Pragmatism will conclude that privatisation has been a failure and that continuing to defend it is beginning to look like an ideology of its own.'

So, Simon, carry on the good work. I think there's very little in terms of what we disagree with on this, and we are inevitably moving to a system where there has to be a restoration of—I don't care whether you call it public ownership or whatever—the democratisation of those services that our lives and the people of our country actually depend on.