Caroline Flint MP, Labour’s Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary, in a speech in Reading, said:

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It’s great to be here with you today in Reading. And I’m pleased to see that Charles Smith, our candidate for Maidenhead, joins us too.

We’re less than nine months away from the next General Election. And the road to Downing Street runs through Reading, so I hope to be back here many more times before next May.

This summer, Ed Miliband and his Shadow Cabinet have been setting out The Choice facing the British people at the General Election in 2015.

Together, they have set out a picture of a Britain governed by values that will find many sympathetic ears in Reading, and the cities, towns and villages that will elect the next government.

It is a Britain where public service is valued, but reform is ongoing;

Where fiscal discipline is matched by fairness;

Where aspiration is embraced, while no one is left behind;

Where individuals can thrive and excel, but community solidarity is not forsaken;

And where new businesses and new jobs are encouraged, in markets that have fair rules, obligations and rewards.

It is that Britain, with fair play at its heart, that I want to talk about today.

And of course, today I’m going to focus on energy bills – something I know Victoria and Matt hear a lot about when listening to local people in Reading – whether that happens to be a working family, a struggling pensioner or a growing business.

All of us have seen our energy bills rising year on year.

And new figures I’ve published today lay bare the full scale of the cost-of-living crisis and David Cameron’s failure to tackle rip-off energy bills.

Because, on David Cameron’s watch, energy bills in Britain have risen by over £300 - twice as fast as inflation, four times faster than wages and faster than almost any other country in the developed world.

Households cannot afford another five years of this.

Reading cannot afford another five years of this.

Britain cannot afford another five years of this.

The reason bills have risen – and will continue to rise, unless something is done about it – is because the energy market is broken.

When the gas and electricity businesses were privatised in the 1980s, the Conservative government promised a competitive market that would deliver a better deal for consumers, competitive prices and sustained investment.

Over 25 years later, it is acutely clear that the Tories’ privatisation has failed to deliver on this promise.

And when David Cameron came into power in 2010, he promised to reform the energy market to ensure fair competition.

He has failed to deliver on his promise.

Gas and electricity prices are uncompetitive.

The market has failed to unlock the investment the country needs.

And public trust and consent has been lost.

So today I want to tell you what Labour will do about it, and to set out The Choice that people in Reading and around the country will face at the next election.

To start with, on entering office, Labour will immediately freeze energy prices until 2017.

In Reading, over 83,000 households will save an average of £120.

And across the country, our price freeze will save money for Britain’s 27 million households and 2.4 million businesses.

Why are we freezing prices? For two very simple reasons.

First, people have been overcharged.

We’ve looked very carefully at the prices consumers have paid in the last few years, compared to the costs the companies have faced.

And it’s clear to us that when wholesale prices have gone up, consumers’ bills have gone up too.

But when those costs have come down, consumers have not seen the full benefit.

So we would stop prices rising further as a way of compensating consumers for overcharging in the past.

But second, it’s also about protecting them from more unfair price rises while we reform the market. And of course, our freeze, wouldn’t stop them cutting their prices.

No-one’s pretending the solutions to our energy market are simple, or can be implemented overnight.

Based on experience of the last time the energy market was reformed, back in 2000, we think it will take us 20 months to fix this market.

But while we’re making those changes, we want to protect people from any more unfair price rises.

And that’s what our price freeze enables us to do.

What are the changes to the energy market that we want to make?

There are three big things we’ve said we’d do, while the price freeze is in place.

First, at the moment we have a situation whereby the big six energy companies generate energy, sell it to themselves and then sell it to the public.

They supply around 95% of all homes in the UK, and generate about 75% of our electricity.

The problem with that is that no-one really has any idea at what price the companies sell the energy to themselves. And if you’re a new company who wants to enter the market and to supply homes or businesses, it is difficult to buy the energy you need.

So we’re going to end the secret deals and internal trades, and make all the energy companies buy all their electricity in an open pool, or exchange, which will open up the market, inject some badly-needed transparency and make it easier for new firms to compete.

Second, because energy companies can both generate power, and then sell it to the public, there’s a suspicion – rightly or wrongly – that the companies can always play the market.

If wholesale prices are high, the generation arm makes big profits.

If they’re low, the supply company makes big profits.

Either way, the company always seems to win and consumers always foot the bill.

So to make this market more transparent, and to deal with the public’s suspicion that something untoward is going on, we will break up the big energy companies by forcing them to legally separate their power stations from the companies that sell energy to the public.

These reforms will create the market conditions we want. But to sustain them, we will create a tough new regulator with new powers to police the market and protect consumers.

This is our third big change.

I’ve never hidden the fact that I think Ofgem, the current regulator, has let down consumers and has helped create the broken market we see today.

In part, that’s happened because they’ve been slow to act, and haven’t made use of the powers they’ve got.

But it’s also because I don’t think they have been given the powers they need.

They don’t have the powers to help the millions of households who are off-the-grid and use heating oil.

There are fewer protections for small businesses.

And crucially, even when they do identify problems – for instance, that energy companies haven’t passed on reductions in wholesale costs – they have very little power to do anything about it.

We’re going to change all of that.

We’re going to create a new regulator.

And we’re going to give it new powers to protect off-grid households and small businesses, and to force energy companies to cut their prices when wholesale costs fall, if they don’t do it first.

But today I want to announce a new power, which the next Labour Government will provide the new regulator with.

Consumers rightly expect to be treated fairly and to be confident that energy companies will meet their obligations and provide good services.

Where companies breach these obligations, decisive action should be taken to put things right and prevent further breaches.

I welcome action through financial penalties, and through customer redress.

But bluntly - it’s too little, too late.

Too many energy companies operate at the margins of what the rules allow because they know that they often won’t be caught. And even if they are caught, the penalties are not enough of a deterrent.

And too often, energy companies seem to view the regulator’s fines as a cost of doing business – not as a warning to get their act together.

Information I am publishing today shows that since 2001, Ofgem has issued 30 fines, totalling nearly £90 million.

But these companies have not learned their lessons – and despite all the previous fines and penalties, they are facing another 16 probes into mis-selling, poor customer service and other bad practice.

No company has a God-given right to be in the market, to charge its customers, and to make a profit - just because it always has.

So today I can announce that the next Labour Government will provide the regulator with the power to revoke energy companies’ licences where there are repeated instances of the most serious and deliberate breaches of their licence conditions which harm the interests of consumers.

Of course, any decision to revoke a licence would have to be consistent with the regulator’s overriding objective of protecting consumers and promoting a competitive, transparent and fair energy market, and be subject to due process.

It builds on best practice from regulators overseas.

In some parts of the United States, the energy market regulators already have the power to revoke energy suppliers’ licences. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, for example, has the power to revoke a suppliers’ licence when they break consumer protection law or when they transfer a customer without their consent.

And it sends the clearest possible message to energy companies: when the price freeze comes to an end, it is not back to business as usual – and if you carry on mistreating your customers, your licence will be on the line.

There will be those, I’m sure, who want to wrongly characterise this as somehow being anti-business.

It’s not.

For one thing, businesses, especially small firms, have been as much at the receiving end of the energy industry’s sharp practices as have households.

But more importantly, there is no such thing as a market without rules.

It is difficult to think of a more vigorously free-market, capitalist economy than the United States.

But regulators there understand that a free market only works when there are proper rules to ensure competition and fair play.

That’s what I want for households and businesses in Britain.

And that’s The Choice people in Reading, and people around the country, will face at the next election.

A choice between an MP like Mr Sharma, who has opposed a price freeze, who has opposed reforms to the energy market, and has opposed new powers for the regulators, and Victoria Groulef, fighting for a fair deal for consumers.

A choice between another five years of rocketing energy bills, rip-off tactics and poor customer service under the Tories – or Labour’s plans to freeze energy bills until 2017, and reform the energy market for the future.

I believe that Reading’s residents, and the British people, deserve a real choice between a society where some operate by another set of rules, immune to the daily pressures of life, and a country where we all live with fair rules, fair play and fair rewards.

That is a choice, which thanks to Labour, they will be offered.

Thank you.

Ends

Please find a link to Labour’s briefing document The Choice: Energy - http://bit.ly/1oUeL60