What do you expect, when we've had 10+ years of government dithering about energy policy? You have to know something about the investment climate before you can sensibly commit billions of pounds.
British governments have been paralysed by indecision on the matter because they couldn't commit to a crowd pleasing format that would keep the lights on and the carbon low and the prices down. Add on top of that the falling price of coal thanks to US shale gas competing out of the American market, and the total failure of the carbon trading scheme that was supposed to make future coal generation uneconomic, but is now doing nothing at all, and you have a cluster SNAFU.
It's myopic to accuse an industry of deliberate non investment. Investing is in almost all cases what they want to do, because they make their bucks getting returns on those investments. The exception is things like cigarette factories, where future investment is kind of doomed, so the best thing to do is to run down what you've already built until it is time to pull down the shutters.
