Currys CEO Alex Baldock & Octopus Energy’s Greg Jackson on Retail, Energy, Regulation and AI

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0:42Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. I'm delighted to bring this special live episode from the Centre of Policy Studies Margaret Thatcher Enterprise Conference. Now look, I get asked to speak at a lot of conferences, get asked to host a podcast at a lot of places, and I wish I could do it all, but whilst running Boxly and making lots of other shows as well, it is quite challenging to do that.

1:22But this one felt a really special opportunity to sit down with two remarkable gentlemen who've had incredible business careers but come at it from quite different angles. So Alex Baldock is the Chief Executive of Curry's and has led a really interesting transformation of the high street chain over the last decade or so. And to be joined by Greg Jackson, who is the Chief Executive and founder of Octopus Energy. Obviously, we are a huge fan of Octopus Energy and so much so, Greg was our 200th guest on Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. He's created more jobs in the United Kingdom than pretty much any other entrepreneur over the last 15 years.

2:03So to talk to the two of them who have come at business from two different angles in what they've done, but are two of the most successful businesses in the UK, felt a really exciting opportunity to get their views on each other's businesses and talk about the different things. So it was a real pleasure and opportunity. And I'd love to know what you think of this episode in particular, because we are looking at maybe doing some mixing up our content a little bit more, getting some more people together for roundtables similar to this. So I would love to know what you think, who would make good pair-ups from the 250 or so guests that you've had before on the show.

2:42So send us a comment on LinkedIn or anywhere on socials. Thanks very much. And I really hope you enjoy this episode. Make sure you subscribe so we can continue to get bigger and bigger guests.

3:06Hello, hello. Good to see you all. Last time I was on stage was on Friday night where I was doing my daughter's school auction and that was much tougher to keep everyone quiet. So I appreciate you being quiet today. We have a fantastic panel lined up for you today. we are joined by two remarkable gentlemen who have had an enormous impact on the UK economy over the last decade, but both from very different angles. Alex here is the chief executive of Curry's. When he became the CEO in 2018, less than 10 % of Curry's sales were online. It's fair to say that Amazon were licking their lips. But fast forward to today, they are 300 stores.

3:54They are at some of their highest profits that they've ever seen. And we'll be talking about the importance of that and what the future holds for online and the high street in this. And also we are joined by Greg Jackson, who is the chief executive of Octopus Energy, which is now the UK's largest household supplier. A little less known is that they also run a business called Kraken, which provides services, provides technology services to lots of other businesses. So it's a fascinating combination of consumer and B2B that Greg has built. And he is an outstanding entrepreneur, so much so that he was the 200th guest on my podcast, Jimmy's Jobs of the Future, having created 11 ,000 jobs over the last decade, which is truly remarkable.

4:45Now, I have introduced you both there as best as I could, but I would also like you to give us a state of where your sector is at and the current size that you're operating as well. Alex, can you go first? Yeah, thanks, Jimmy. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for having me. Curries is the market-leading technology retailer and services provider in the UK and in Northern Europe. So we sell a lot of fridges and laptops and tellies, mobile phone and the like. And then we sell the services around that. And we are getting on for 10 billion of sales. We're market leader, as I say, in the UK and in Northern Europe.

5:24And we've got 24 ,000 colleagues. And give us a size of the impact of retail on the whole of the UK economy as well. Yeah, I mean, today's theme is about prosperity, isn't it? We think that retail is in the box seat to power both jobs and growth in the UK. And the two obviously go together. I mean, we're an engine room sector. We don't tend to feature very much in government industrial policies. We perhaps lack the sexiness of life sciences and creative industries and the like. But we're an employment hotspot. So getting on for 20 % of the private sector workforce work in retail. Thick end of 6 million jobs.

6:03And they are not just lots of jobs, but they're the right jobs as well. They're productive jobs. Our productivity is growing at twice the national average. And as any economist will tell you, productivity is the key to growth. But they're also suitable jobs. I mean, if there's a worklessness crisis in the UK today and unemployment, depending on how you count, is somewhere between two and nine million people. And if we want large numbers of people off welfare and back into work, for example, it's going to be jobs like retail jobs, flexible entry level jobs with good prospects that give people experience and confidence to get on and to be introduced or reintroduced into the world of work, which we specialise in.

6:45So, you know, we should be the engine room of job creation and of growth, but as no doubt we'll get onto, policy isn't always facilitating that. And Greg, give us a sense of the size of Octopus Energy and some of the different products that you are now doing as well. Thank you. Octopus is just over 10 years old and we operate in 30 countries but we've got about 8 million household customers in the UK so just under 30 % share from zero and we've got another 4 million retail customers in other countries growing very rapidly that doubled last year for example. Beyond that you just mentioned Kraken, which is the technology business that provided the software that we built our company on.

7:36We really built Octopus to prove what you could do with technology in a very stolid sector like energy, and then licensed it to other companies. Those are the companies are almost all our rivals. And increasingly, what we found was our rivals in other countries became quite nervous of what Octopus had achieved here and so we've had to separate to demerge Kraken in order to allow rivals to license it more comfortably but and that process is just about complete valuing Kraken around nine billion dollars and I guess yeah in scale between Kraken and Octopus we employ 13 ,000 people and our combined revenue is around 20 billion dollars a year as well as retail energy which is what we're well known for in the UK we also lease electric cars to our customers so there's a fleet of nearly two billion pounds worth of cars on the road today owned by Octopus but leased to our customers it's kind of like the car phone warehouse of electric cars if you like so you get the bundle of the car, the charging, the advice, out of home charging and a bunch of other stuff.

8:49And then, you know, less obviously, we provide an out of home charging platform for electric vehicles across 100 countries with 2 million charge points on it with one and a half million drivers. So I guess for us, we've taken the opportunity of the change in the energy sector, and change energy technologies to very rapidly build out where we thought incumbents weren't necessarily mean customer needs as well. And I should just quickly say, I take huge inspiration from retail. Alex's words there on retail landed so strongly with me, not just because we're at the Margaret Thatcher event, but the reality, 20 years ago, I worked at a company called Procter & Gamble.

9:36We sold shampoo and soap and things like that through retailers. 20 years ago, retailers, even 20 years ago, they were using technology to squeeze out every bit of waste in the system. We used to send lorries to Tesco that had to get there within a 15-minute window because Tesco's lorries would be waiting near the side of a warehouse and the products wouldn't touch the shelves. And then I moved into a sector like energy, which is unbelievably wasteful. And customers pay the price. I think the whole thing is in retail, there's absolutely ferocious competition. So that companies drive down the operating costs, drive down every bit of cost to serve customers better.

10:17And in energy, unfortunately, the degree of capture and regulation means that companies get away with being brutally inefficient and just passing the cost of that onto customers. And you know what? It's not even cynical. They just don't know that they could be better. but the retail sector shows us what's possible in so many other places. And what's fascinating is that both businesses, the British probably will have a view on what you sell but actually you've both diversified massively into kind of other areas and the service side as well in terms of the repeatable business. Both cultures therefore are quite entrepreneurial whether it's corporate or whether it's started by an entrepreneur yourself.

10:59What's the one thing that government could do to encourage enterprise? What's the one policy lever that it could pull? Shall I go? Please. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things in there. I mean, you mentioned culture, and I will come on to government very shortly. But I think there's a popular appreciation of business that can usefully be built as well. And for this, I'm looking in the mirror. I think people like me need to do a better job of selling to the great British public the benefits of business. And at the heart of those benefits are profitable businesses. And you sometimes have to travel quite far to find business people boasting about how much profit you're making now.

11:40But I strongly believe that purpose and profit have to go hand in hand. And if business can play a powerful force for good in society, it's only because we're able to do that because we're making enough money to do it. Because if we're not making enough money, I can't pay the colleagues what we want to. We can't hire more people. We can't give them the prospects that they want. We can't improve the customer's experience. We can't contribute to the nest eggs, the comfortable retirement, the shareholders, producers. So making the case publicly and proudly for the social benefit of a successful, profitable business, I think is one thing we could do.

12:18What are the margins that you're operating? Well, Greg referred to this. Retail's a knife fight. And we do well if we make just over two pounds of profit for every hundred pounds worth of stuff that we sell. And so when sometimes, and you do hear this from members of the public and from policymakers even, um well we kind of need some more money this year do you think you could make a little bit less profit yeah well the answer is we need to make more not less because it's making more profit that attracts the investment that we need into the uk it's more profit that allows us to hire more people to to open and to and to kit out more stores to improve the website for customers and to keep prices down and that's the that's the case that i think business could be better at making than people like me are doing today.

13:09So that's on the social side, if you like, making the cultural case for the importance of business. As for policy, I think we can get into all sorts of angles of this, but I think if the government were better able to join up aims and actions, that would be good. The government knows that we need more jobs and we need more growth. We know that a zero-sum society is quite a fractious one And then the only way to improve living standards of somebody without taking them away from somebody else is per capita GDP. Everyone knows that. And everyone knows we want more jobs. The prime minister said that the number of people on welfare is an economic and moral emergency.

13:49And I'd agree with him. But what we need to do is to help business play its role in making those things happen. To reduce costs and to reduce red tape in ways we can get into that allow us to invest, allow us to hire, allow us to grow. Greg, on the encouraging enterprise side, what more could be done from government? Yeah, first of all, I think that we need a recognition that by harnessing the forces of competition, you can actually achieve far more than when you try and directly control things. If you've ever read Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, he talks about how the pursuit of selfishness can actually generate dramatically better outcomes for the whole of society.

14:30And I think understanding that the messy world of competition and contestability in the medium term generates the innovation and the focus on efficiency that will help make society richer. That's the core of it. I think that there are some very, and that's not just to be a rampant, you know, we shouldn't have any regulation. At the end of the day, the Wages and Measures Act gave us 150 years worth of exactly appropriate competition. And so I think small amounts of highly flexible regulation that allow free enterprise to its job is right. What's not right is enormous amounts of cloying regulation.

15:18To give you an example, by the way, in our sector, Ofgem's regulations for energy originally was 75 pages it's now 1 200. every single line of that creates an army of people both within the regulator and within every company that are just sending each other reports that are becoming nervous or moving because they might make a mistake and it's a continually constraining the degrees of freedom we all have to innovate and do things better competition drives great results I think that Can I put you on that? Like there's basically just teams of emails within the regulator and a company sending each of their emails, right?

16:00This is one of my great fears of AI, right? Because humans are actually quite good at creating work for each other. I don't know how many people have sat in a pointless meeting at any point, right? But we're very good at that. Do you think there's a danger with AI that we end up ratcheting regulation up even more because it becomes easier to do? I think, I mean, look, I don't want to go too far out of my own wheelhouse, But I think what we have seen is that when you automate law enforcement, for example, you know, you end up having to paint speed cameras yellow because they don't have the sort of latitude that a police officer had to make some human judgment in any given situation.

16:36And so I think human judgment has really mattered. But the reality is that in a world of process driven regulation, you also lose human judgment. Instead of people making a decision in any given scenario, what they do is they defer to the rules and the rules very often weren't designed to accommodate a specific situation. I'll give you an example right now. Today on Bloomberg there's a story about Scotland's biggest wind farm. By the way I love wind farms right? Controversial I know but good bad whatever but let's be really clear that every turn of a wind turbine shouldn't mean we burn less gas which is good for our economy because it's the cheapest form of electricity when we're generating.

17:13It's also important for climate. And Mrs Thatcher was, of course, the first world leader to speak at the UN about climate change because she was a scientist. But put that aside for a sec. The biggest wind farm in Scotland is, according to Bloomberg, choosing not to take its subsidies, which sounds like a good thing, except that's because they have a one-way subsidy regime. It was a mistake, just a loophole in the regulation, which means that once they finish construction they decide when to enact the subsidy and at the moment the market price is higher than the subsidized price so they have a free pass which is if the market price was lower they'd take the subsidy and while it's higher they take the market price and that will cost UK build payers tens of millions of pounds this year right no one's got any choice then in fact to make matters worse by the way that wind farm is also the one which is paid the most to turn off on windy days.

18:1260 % of the time it earns money by not generating electricity rather than generating it. And I think the reason I talk here about the competition and contestability being superior to rules and regulation is exemplified by that. If I could, as a retailer of energy, I want to be able to have the freedom that Alex does to go and negotiate with his suppliers, to push the cost relentlessly down, to give our customers a bargain. We'll work out what customers want and the system should be there to deliver for them. But in so many sectors, it's becoming the other way around. And by the way, the point that Greg makes, I mean, in our sector, in 1990, Paris was paying the same per kilowatt hour as Best Buy, our US equivalent.

18:56We're now paying five times as much. Wow. That's extraordinary. How do you think that the conflict in the Middle East is going to impact energy prices? And how do you think it's going to impact retailing prices towards the end of this year? I mean, very briefly, first of all, and again, I know some of this is potentially controversial, and I'm totally happy to get deeper into it with people afterwards via social media or whatever.

19:30But of course, I said publicly that I would be more comfortable buying gas from the North Sea than I am from the other side of the world. Liquid natural gas, which we import from other countries, is inefficient, takes enormous amounts of energy to compress it, transport it, keep it compressed, then decompress it. And it's pretty leaky. Methane, which is worse than carbon dioxide, of greenhouse gas. So if you care about emissions or you care about efficiency, then gas from the North Sea is generally better than gas from the other side of the world. But I think this crisis, just three years after the crisis we had following Ukraine's invasion of Russia, should be a real wake-up call that a fossil fuel world is always prone to periodic crises.

20:16I grew up in the 1970s. I think the first crisis of my life was 73, and there have been intermittent ones ever since. The reality is that it doesn't matter how much we say, if we invest more in fossil fuels, then we'll be less vulnerable to these shocks. The oil and gas industry, by the way, a remarkable success story, which we won't be proud of, but the oil and gas industry will not invest in spare capacity because it will be economically inefficient, which means when shocks come along, there will never be spare supply, which means we'll always see price spikes, we'll always see the risk of shortage of specific products.

20:56At this time, for the first time ever, we do have alternatives. And what I'm seeing is that demand for domestic solar, solar on people's roofs, has more than doubled since this crisis started for us as a company. Demand for electric vehicles up 80%. Electric vehicle charge is obviously about the same. Heat pumps more than doubled. Because I think households and consumers are seeing this and just saying, look, if I electrify, I can insulate myself. On a global scale, China's exports of clean energy technologies, the ones I've just named, are double in March of 2026, would double what they were in March of 2025.

21:35Now, people will often say to me, yeah, look, you can choose whether you're dependent on Qatar, the USA, or China. The difference is if you're buying gas from Qatar, every time you use it, the very same day, the next day, you need to buy it all again. If you buy solar panels, for example, from China, then you've got 20 years' worth of energy independence. And back on this comparison with retailers, retailers spot China as a manufacturing powerhouse decades ago, and every retailer became very, very good at buying from China. I went and did the same. The Chinese wind turbines, 30 to 40 % cheaper than British ones.

22:11In fact, if they install themselves in China, it's 60 % cheaper. That's giving them 20 years of energy that's 60 % cheaper than ours. And it isn't dependent on global supply shocks. So I think the big thing we have to do here is say, there are technologies now to electrify our economy, which will enable us to reduce our dependence on markets that are prone to shocks. and very specifically the UK is an economy that's roughly 22 % electrified. There are plenty of economies now that are over 30 % and because electricity is more efficient than gas, coal or petrol, oil, actually every time you move some of your driving, for example, from petrol to electricity, you reduce your total demand for energy.

23:00So that percentage of electrification goes up more than you would expect. we're currently losing perhaps the most important race in the world of energy. And I hope this is the wake-up call that lets us say, look, as a free market capitalist, I want to bring my customers the cheapest energy. Our current policy makes renewables expensive. It shouldn't be that way. All right. Electric car uses seven times less, it's seven times cheaper to run than a petrol car. Now, who knows that? All right. Policy's got in the way of us being able to look after customers and that kills me. Where do you think in terms of inflation that we might be by the end of the year?

23:35You're getting it. Yeah, I mean, you asked specifically about the crisis in the Gulf at the moment. I mean, in the short term, that's not having a massive impact on businesses like ours, not directly, not in the short term. There are a number of longer term shocks on the way, however, I mean, the biggest of them is going to be demand. And inevitably, when you have global recessions, people spend less money on stuff. And that's going to feed through into a squeeze in the market that carries cells, for one. But more broadly than that, you were asking about cost inflation and the role of the crisis in the Gulf of driving that.

24:17There are certain things in the world like geopolitics that I can't do a great deal about. and policymakers in the UK don't have an enormous amount of agency over either. Greg talked about one area where they emphatically do, but it's not the only one. We are consciously and deliberately loading more costs and more red tape onto businesses today in a way that is dampening growth and it's dampening job creation. And this is why I mentioned before, Jimmy, that the idea would be to join up the dots between stated aims and the actions that government takes. And whether you look at the moment in loading more costs of employing people, which the government has done serially, and the harder, riskier and more expensive you make it to employ people, don't be too surprised when fewer people are employed.

25:08And then the greater the costs and the red tape of building anything in the UK. I mean, talking about renewables, I guess you would include nuclear in that, broadly defined. I'd love to spend an hour telling you how badly we do on that. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, one, this is more your wheelhouse than mine, so I'm sure you'll correct my stat, but I did read that South Korea can build the same nuclear power station in much less time and at a quarter of the cost than you can in the UK because of, partly because of all the red tape, but it's not just that. But is it a culture? How much of this is a cultural thing though, right?

25:41Because yes, red tape regulation plays a part in it as well, But how much of it is a cultural thing when it comes to enterprise and prosperity that we're just not as kind of hardwired like that anymore as a country? If you want to be gloomy about it, you could read Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times yesterday, who was talking about the wild popularity of price controls in grocery. I mean, you were talking, Greg, about how retail is a brutally competitive and therefore quite an efficient market. I mean, even the best grocer in the country, Tesco, makes just under three pounds of profit for every hundred pounds worth of stuff that it sells.

26:18The cost inflation that's been driven is largely policy driven. If you employ large numbers of people in the UK, that cost got a lot higher after the October 24 budget. And that is one of the things feeding through into inflation. But you ask about the culture. One of the things in Lawson's article yesterday was that 70 % of people in the UK approve of price controls on grocery retains, despite the proven effect of that, shortages and worse that come from that. So until we've changed the narrative, until people like me are doing a better job of making the case for competitive business and successful, profitable business, and making the case for less regulatory intervention, then I think we can expect these attitudes to endure.

27:06So what does business need to do more of to get out and make its case then, Greg? I'll tell you what, by the way, it's quite funny you're listening to there, Alex, because Altapur sometimes makes a profit, sometimes it doesn't. By the way, when we don't, it's because we're investing in growth. You know, last year we probably made 300 million profit, but we invested 500 million in growth in the UK and overseas. All of that growth creating future wealth, creating employment, creating the ability to pay more tax to support the public services we do need, to be really clear. Now interestingly, if we make a profit, we get chastised for making a profit on something people have to buy.

27:40I always point out by the way, do we expect, I presume the NHS pays Microsoft licenses for excel you know like where do you stop in that world you know demanding that companies should do something for free because it's important but i think the um we also get chastised if we don't make a profit even though that's because we're investing in future growth uh because then it will be you know are these companies sustainable and so on you know and one of the great things about free market is we let our investors take those risks and decisions and if they get it right they do very very well and if they get it wrong they pay the price it's remarkable how incentivized they are to get this right and and i think we should trust that um i think on the uh and i was talking there about um different forms of energy generation i should be very clear by the way i think we're also this uk's second biggest seller of gas and i don't apologize for that like we need it um in the long run we might need a lot less and that would be a good thing but you know we shouldn't chastise these things but what i was going to say is uh when it comes to electricity, we can buy electricity, we can generate electricity from solar panels in the UK at about 5p a unit, from onshore wind about 5p a unit, from offshore wind and from gas at maybe 10p a unit, but households typically pay at least 25p a unit.