Stephen Littlechild

The Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG) held a celebration of the work of Stephen Littlechild, a leading economist in the field of markets and regulation, featuring papers from some of his many colleagues within the UK and internationally. The 24-25 March seminar featured 10 papers on subjects which highlight Stephen’s varied contribution to the academic literature, including: ‘The Evolution of Price Control Regulation’, ‘The Role of Benchmarking in Incentive Regulation’ and ‘The Impact of Grid Defection on Economic Regulation during periods of Significant Cost Escalation’.

Research from Cambridge Judge Business School has been instrumental in developing a new system of energy market regulation Research from Cambridge Judge Business School's Dr Michael Pollitt, Reader in Business Economics, and Dr Stephen Littlechild, Fellow in Privatisation, Regulation & Competition, has been instrumental in developing a new system of regulation which encourages engagement with customers, say energy regulators. Cambridge Judge Business School's regulatory unit is respected internationally as possibly the leading institution in economic regulation," says former Ofgem CEO Alistair Buchanan. "Their views and models are sought across the globe. He adds that Dr Pollitt and Dr Littlechild's involvement provided credibility to Ofgem's 'very significant' RPI-X@20 review of network prices. Energy network charges make up around 20 per cent of the total charges that a typical householder pays. Dr Pollitt and Dr Littlechild's body of research, carried out between 2006 and 2009, aimed to improve upon the then current system of controlling annual price changes within energy networks, which used a formula known as RPI -X (retail price index, or simply the rate of inflation, minus X, in which X is the efficiency factor) and dated from the early 1980s. However, by 2005, energy networks had been price cap…