Andy Burnham has made some things very clear to the Great British public since coming to power last July. The nation is now well-aware of his favourite pub snack (crisps, uncontroversially). And we know that it’s likely to be Oasis coming through his AirPods on one of his constituency jogs.

Another thing we now have a bit of clarity on is energy.

At Labour Party Conference, Burnham pledged to bring down energy costs by introducing greater public control of the system in the form of Great British Grids, which itself will be an arm of Great British Energy. This all part of a wider strategy to bring growth to every postcode.

We’re on board. But we do have some thoughts. And to explore them we first need to widen the lens slightly.

What's actually on your bill

Bills are high, we know that. What’s actually in them helps us to understand why.

Around 60% of a typical business electricity bill isn't electricity at all. It’s the wires and pylons, the balancing of the grid and a growing pile of government energy policy. The industry calls these non-commodity costs or NCCs, a name so dull that it’s little surprise they’re not more widely discussed.

But they should be, because they’re important. That money isn’t abstract, it’s real, and think of what a small business could unlock with more of it. A new hire, a youth club revamp, a bakery finally launching its gluten-free range. Business growth takes hard work, but it also takes money.

The bad news is they’re non-negotiable. Everyone pays. No energy company can take them away, including us. They’re in essence an invisible tax nobody voted for. And because the amount you pay depends on how much energy you use, they do exactly the opposite of encouraging growth in every postcode.

The bill is arriving before the benefit

The government are onto something with the grid. Maintaining and balancing it is a big reason why NCCs are so high. It needs investing in having barely been touched for over 20 years, a period in which renewable generation has taken off nationwide. To take advantage of it, and to bring down costs along the way, we need a grid able to harness and deploy it where it’s needed.

GB Grid's promised £4bn is a start, although it looks a little low against Ofgem’s estimate of £70bn for a full upgrade. The problem is the payoff takes years, while the costs are landing on business right now. In April, for example, the charge for the high-voltage network (TNUoS) rose around 60% on average, landing with a thud on most bills (although tem took a different approach).

There are things that could be happening now to help bring down the burden of NCCs, so much so that Claire, tem’s Chief of Staff, has written a whole manifesto about it, including ideas like moving them off bills and into general taxation and putting a ban on mid-period price hikes. But what about in the meantime?

tem’s approach to NCCs

The short answer is that they stay on your bill. But how visible they are is up to your supplier. Many bundle them, bury them, leave them unexplained entirely. If you can’t see what you’re paying for, you can’t scrutinise them, and you’re left in the crosshairs of a nasty surprise when a charge moves mid-period.

tem takes a different approach. Nothing hidden. No surprises. Everything explained upfront. We know how important energy costs are so we want every business supplied by us to understand everything that goes into them.

We put zero markup on any of the NCCs, meaning we make nothing from them. We also aim to make them as legible as possible. Some are passthrough, meaning they arrive with you directly, as a single figure – we itemise these by name and amount. When they change, as TNUoS did this year, we’ll show you by exactly how much and let you know when that change will be applied. Others are baked into your unit rate. This is because they’re based on estimates of your power usage and on rates that are published in advance. That means we can forecast them and lock them in for your whole contract, so they won’t change mid-contract.

As part of our commitment to shining a light on the shadowy world of NCCs and what they mean for a business bill, we’ve built a dedicated resource hub. Each charge explained in plain English, alongside how tem handles them. Business owners are busy, we get that, but think of this like the safety manual on a plane: it’s worth reading because it doesn’t matter until it really does matter.

And the rest of the bill?

We’ve covered the 60%, so what about what’s left? It’s a fair point. And it’s where tem really does things differently.

Just as NCCs are characterised by illegibility, and, frankly, confusing, so too is the way energy is bought and sold. Between your energy being produced and it arriving with you, it passes through a warren of intermediaries (traders, aggregators, risk desks, suppliers) so complex a particularly industrious rabbit would be proud. These layers, we estimate, add on 30% to a typical business energy bill.

We aim to give you as much of that 30% back as possible. Our technology, what we call our pricing infrastructure, is able to skip the warren almost completely and put those wasted pounds back in your wallet.

This we’re proud of, but it’s also why we find NCCs so frustrating. We want to bring energy closer to what it actually costs to produce and NCCs get in the way of that.

Potatoes, salt, oil, TNUoS (!?)

As the Prime Minister winds down in the pub after a day at the dispatch box, should he be in particularly boring company, he could flip over his bag of crisps and read the list of ingredients. There, he’d find out exactly what goes into them. Some would be fine, like the (hopefully present) potatoes, some might read more like the letters and numbers on your phone screen after sitting on it, which would be less fine.

The undesirable elements, it would be within his power to try and do something about. Even the desirable elements, he could try and make sure they’re added with the utmost care and consideration for the person consuming the final product.

I hope you can see where I’m going with this. Your energy bill is made up of parts. We, firstly, want everyone who has to pay one to know what’s in there and understand them. And secondly for some speedy action on how these elements land on business owners. We don’t, it’d be fair to say, want NCCs, in their current form at least, to Live Forever (sorry).