Burnham's in Downing Street. Energy leaders have already told him what to do.

The argument nobody's actually having

The public conversation about UK energy is too often framed as a fight - oil and gas versus renewables, growth versus net zero. Read 45 sets of answers from people who actually run energy companies, and that fight barely shows up. 

Several respondents rejected it outright, describing UK energy as "an ecosystem that needs one coherent plan," not a series of either/or votes. The same executives pushing for Rosebank and Jackdaw are, in the next sentence, asking for floating wind auction budgets to be protected and grid connections fixed. 

Even planning reform - selected by 40% of survey respondents, and mostly an oil and gas ask when you count it up - produced its two sharpest, most systemic proposals from the renewables side of the room, not the oil and gas side. Nobody in this group is fighting the war the headlines often seem to describe.

Read this pulse alongside that, and alongside the interviews behind Aspect's February white paper, Confidence on the Edge, and a pattern holds across six months and two audiences — industry and policymakers, asked separately, keep arriving at the same diagnosis. Ambition was never the problem. Execution is what's in doubt.

The EPL test

31% of respondents raised the Energy Profits Levy unprompted as one of their top three actions for the new PM. Almost every one of them paired it with the same second ask: finalise whatever replaces it, then don't touch it again for the Parliament.

This isn't really an argument about the tax rate. It's the same "policy and investment confidence" factor policymakers themselves named as decisive when we interviewed them in May for Aspect's From Ambition to Alignment which makes it one of the few points in UK energy policy where both sides of the table are, for once, diagnosing the same problem.

The delivery test

The renewables and wider-energy respondents describe a parallel version of the same confidence test. Developers asked for multi-year visibility of CfD budgets, a credible route for floating wind, transmission charging reform and a grid queue that prioritises consented, financeable projects. As one put it: "A wind farm with consent but no connection date is effectively stranded capital."

These are not competing asks. The same need for certainty runs through a fiscal regime, an auction timetable and a connection date: government should commit, make the project buildable, and then hold the line.

The Jackdaw test

Jackdaw and Rosebank came up almost as often, and almost nobody argued for them on pure commercial grounds. The case made repeatedly is substitution: the UK keeps consuming oil and gas through the transition regardless, so the only real choice is whether the jobs, tax and supply chain sit here or get exported along with the barrels. You don't have to find that argument conclusive to notice it's the one industry is already making to its own supply chains, and increasingly to government.

A relationship still to build

Here's the finding I didn't expect. Rt Hon Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting were this cohort's clear picks for Chancellor; Michael Shanks was the runaway favourite for Energy Secretary. None of them got the job. John Healey MP - a name that appears nowhere across 45 responses - became Chancellor, and Miatta Fahnbulleh was appointed Energy Secretary, arriving with a public profile some of this audience are already reading with the same scepticism they applied to her predecessor.

That's not a verdict on either appointment. It's a signal that neither has a track record yet with the people who actually decide where UK energy capital goes, which is a genuine opening, not just a gap. The first substantive conversations either of them has with this sector will do more to set the tone of this Parliament than any strategy document. 

Not everyone agrees, and that's useful

I'd be doing this pulse data a disservice if I presented it as unanimous. One respondent warned that fast-tracking new licences sends the wrong signal on the UK's 2050 net zero commitment and reads current momentum as reactive rather than strategic. The consensus here is real, but it's a consensus on process - certainty, delivery speed, one plan - not on every individual call.