No, I am going to make some progress. Since privatisation, the UK’s energy sector has attracted around £20 billion a year of private capital investment into our energy infrastructure. That money would otherwise have had to come from higher taxes or additional borrowing. Those are policies that the Opposition may prefer, but we prefer to secure private capital to secure those public goods.
The cost of transporting a unit of electricity has fallen by 17% since the 1990s, while investment has increased. Energy efficiency has gone up. Reliability has increased. Customer service has improved—though it is still not perfect. The number of power cuts has almost halved. These are the real lived experiences of people over the last 30 or 40 years of privatisation. Finally, current market arrangements have allowed for massive decarbonisation of our energy system, with dramatic drops in the cost of renewables.
It is worth making the point that between 1990 and 2019, we grew the UK economy by 76%, and we cut our emissions by over 44%, decarbonising faster than any other G7 country. That is an extraordinary achievement, secured by the private sector working in partnership with Government. There is more. In the last 15 years, not only have we led the way in decarbonisation; we have also led the way in many of the specific areas of clean energy. We have put it at the heart of the UK’s commitment to reduce emissions as we expand our economy.
Personally, having arrived here following the 2010 election, I would have liked to have seen the coalition and the Lib Dem-run Department of Energy and Climate Change take the opportunity of a “buy one, get five free” nuclear deal and double and modernise our nuclear
capacity. The Lib Dems were religious in opposition to anything nuclear—a position seemingly mirrored by the SNP—but they also thought it would take too long to come on stream. I have news for listeners. It would have been on stream now. We would have had a high-quality, green, resilient supply of nuclear energy for one more generation, guaranteeing clean and green resilience, and many jobs in Scotland, and we would have been able to use this period to invest in the range of renewables that hon. Members have hardly mentioned. I will come to those in a minute.
Nobody can look back and say that this was all easy. A lot of mistakes have been made, but the truth is that our net zero strategy is the most comprehensive of its kind. The British energy security strategy sets out extra ambitions to those we set out in 2010. It is on track to secure 480,000 well-paid jobs by the end of the 2030s, unlocking £100 billion in private investment by 2030 and mobilising £30 billion of Government investment. That is not the free market with no support from Government. It is a massive programme of Government in partnership with the private sector, and that is why we have driven down emissions at the fastest rate in the G7.