Who pays for tomorrow? Affordability and investment dominate Future of Utilities Summit

Affordability and investment ran through nearly every non-AI session at this 2026’s Future of Utilities Summit, with speakers repeatedly returning to the question of who funds transformation and how much further customers can be asked to pay. 

The closing keynote, delivered by Mary Starks, VP of Policy, Regulation and Risk at OVO, set out the scale of the issue. Starks said the £24 billion energy price guarantee, introduced without targeting, could instead have funded the Warm Homes Discount for 24 years. Retail energy prices remain roughly 50% above pre-crisis levels, and forbearance for struggling customers now adds around £50 a year to other households’ bills. Quoting Ofgem chief executive Tim Jarvis’s call for a “new social contract,” Starks said decisions about who bears cost, who takes risk and who captures reward are ultimately questions of fairness and trust. 

Other sessions filled in the detail behind that argument. Christopher Shead of E.ON Next traced energy bills from around £1,000 before the pandemic to £1,800–£1,900 now, having peaked near £5,000. Edward de Mas Latrie and Dominic Gregory, presenting on customer experience, said UK consumer debt is up 71% since 2023, that three-quarters of indebted customers have no repayment plan, and that 40% don’t know support is available at all. They also flagged agent churn of 31% across the sector, which is removing institutional knowledge at the same time as customer queries are getting more complex. 

A panel on financial vulnerability, with Ed Rees of Energy UK, Ivan Lourie of Octopus Energy and Maria Georgiou of Utility Warehouse, went furthest into the practical barriers. Rees said 16% of customers remain on standard credit, a million have missing contact details, and only half are registered on the Priority Services Register – making proactive support difficult to deliver at scale. The panel called for outcome-based regulation in place of prescriptive rules, and for government to release income and health data so vulnerability can be identified earlier. 

Water saw a parallel set of pressures. Ofwat‘s interim chief executive, Chris Walters, took live audience questions on the Blue Stage. Ruth Jefferson of Wessex Water said the sector needs to “manage rain better where it lands,” while David Hinton of South East Water argued that water quality, security and the environment need to be held in “optimal balance, not in a hierarchy.” A later investment panel – Iain McGuffog of South West Water, Matt Humphrey of Anglian Water and Cathryn Ross of Thames Water – discussed how far regulatory reform should go beyond the Cunliffe review, the role of green bonds and blended finance, and how suppliers should make data centres contribute to the capacity investment their demand is driving. 

Grid capacity featured its own set of figures. Akshay Kaul of Ofgem cited £1.5 billion a year lost to wind curtailment and a storage connection queue running at three times the level required for 2030. On the panel addressing the capacity crunch, David Boyer of the Energy Networks Association said the mantra for the next few years “isn’t drill baby drill but build baby build” – pointing to the less quotable work behind it: transmission and distribution coordination, smart grid tooling and planning reform. 

Storage and flexibility sessions added further detail without offering an easy fix. As more zero-marginal-cost renewables come online, wholesale prices get pushed towards zero during peak production, undermining the investment case for the very assets that drove prices down in the first place. Flexibility – EVs, batteries, demand-side response – was repeatedly framed as part of the answer, but speakers were clear that take-up depends on making participation effortless for ordinary customers rather than simply commercially attractive. 

The throughline across the Summit’s sessions was a sector facing a large and growing investment bill – for resilience, decarbonisation and digital capability – at a time when customers are less able, and arguably less willing, to absorb additional cost than at almost any point in recent memory. Starks closed the event on that note: if the sector doesn’t decide who pays for tomorrow today, tomorrow will decide for itself.