Time for Rishi Sunak to get serious about helping with energy bills
Rishi Sunak’s first attempt to “take the sting out” of rising household energy bills was a bits-and-pieces £9bn support package that seemed to rest on the idea that the crisis would go away soon. The giveaway in the thinking was the £200 per household “rebate” that represented about half the headline figure. It wasn’t a rebate in a true sense – it was just a means to shove a portion of customers’ bill into later years, when, the chancellor was presumably calculating, wholesale prices would be lower.
The plan sounded hopeful when unveiled in February but now reads as naive and politically unfeasible. Latest projections suggest October’s price cap will rise by another £600 per household on average – that’s on top of the £694 increase that kicked in at the start of this month. And a key point, as a battalion of energy bosses told MPs on the business and energy select committee on Tuesday, is that the new tariff will apply during the winter months of peak consumption.
That matters to anybody who pays for their energy via a prepayment meter, which typically tends to be lower-income households. At the moment, the hit from April’s higher tariff has been slightly softened by lower consumption levels. Come October, higher prices will coincide with a rise in demand. Further fiddles with “rebates”, or even a further widening of the £150 a year warm homes discount scheme, aren’t going to cut it.
Even today’s position is generating a surge in bad debts and calls from concerned customers, all the chief executives reported. Here was Keith Anderson of Scottish Power: “It has got to a stage now where the size and scale of it is beyond what I can deal with, beyond what I think this industry can deal with. I think it needs a massive shift, a
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