Five EU countries are pressing Britain to rejoin the bloc’s internal electricity market, days before a Brussels summit, but the access will come at a price.
The push came in a joint letter to the European Commission, first reported by the AFP news agency and picked up by Euronews and The Guardian. Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark called on Brussels to speed up talks on bringing the UK back into the single electricity market before leaders meet in the Belgian capital on 20 November.
The five governments framed it as a prize for the whole continent. “It is essential to reach an agreement,” they wrote, describing the North Sea as “the largest clean-energy hub in the world” and arguing that tying Britain back in would unlock offshore wind on a vast scale.
There is a catch. European officials have made clear that Britain would have to pay a financial contribution for the access, most likely into the EU budget or its cohesion fund, with no figure yet written down. Belgium and Germany have separately warned against London cherry-picking the benefits of the single market without following its rules.
Supporters say the reward would show up on the household bill. The supplier Octopus Energy has estimated that reconnecting to the European market could cut a typical British bill by up to £189 a year, and industry figures put UK industrial electricity prices at around 45 per cent above the G7 average.
Cheaper power has been a signature promise of Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who replaced Keir Starmer over the summer. His government has treated closer energy ties with Europe as one route to bringing prices down, a message its negotiators have pushed hard since the reset began.
Not everyone is convinced. The former Conservative MP Lord Redwood told GB News the plan amounted to a “Chagos-style” surrender of control over British electricity, warning it could sign the country up to “even dearer energy and higher energy taxes”. Critics also point to EU wording that any deal “should not give the United Kingdom the right to participate in the Union’s decision-making”, and to a permanent payment that some estimate could run into billions.
For readers in Portsmouth and across the south coast, the row lands where it is felt most, on the monthly energy bill. Lower wholesale prices would ripple through to homes and small businesses here just as they would anywhere in the country, which is why a dry-sounding negotiation in Brussels is worth watching from the Solent.
What the 20 November summit has to settle
The talks flow from the post-Brexit reset launched at a summit in May, where both sides agreed to explore the terms for Britain rejoining the EU’s internal electricity market. Progress since has been slow, and the five-country letter is an attempt to inject urgency before leaders gather again.
Several threads still have to be untangled before anything is signed:
- the size of the entry fee Britain would pay for electricity access, still blank on paper;
- whether that money flows into the EU budget, the cohesion fund, or both;
- a separate demand that UK firms pay between 1 and 6 billion euros to join the bloc’s defence fund;
- how much say, if any, London would keep over rules it would then have to follow.
None of it is likely to be settled in a single day in Brussels. Our reading at Portsmouth And is that the shape of any eventual bill will matter to households as much as the headline of a deal, because that is the part that reaches the meter at home.
Whether the five capitals get their way or Brussels holds out for a bigger cheque, the next move belongs to the leaders meeting on 20 November. We will carry the result, alongside the rest of our UK politics and money news, once the talks wrap up.
For now the picture is a familiar one from the Brexit years, two sides that both want a deal and cannot yet agree on the price.
