UK energy bills ‘set to cost two month’s wages’, ministers warned
Ministers have been warned that energy bills will cost more than two month’s wages next year unless new help is given to households, as the chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, told firms they must invest their “extraordinary” profits or face the threat of further taxation.
The TUC ramped up calls for the government to cancel the October energy price cap rise, saying the cost of living crisis this winter was an “emergency of pandemic scale”.
It also urged trade union and business leaders to help the government find solutions, as they did when devising the furlough scheme.
The monthly take-home pay for the average worker will be £2,054 next year, based on Bank of England forecasts, while the annual cost of energy is predicted to be £4,200.
Treasury officials are working on a number of options for the next prime minister, which could include extending the windfall tax on oil and gas companies announced by Rishi Sunak earlier this year to electricitygeneration.
However, the frontrunner to become the next prime minister, Liz Truss, has made it clear it is not a path she intends to go down.
The Tory leadership candidates again clashed bitterly over economic policy at Thursday night’s hustings event in Cheltenham, with Sunak saying Truss’s tax cut-based approach to the energy crisis risks putting millions of Britons in “real destitution”.
New analysis by the Tony Blair Institute also laid bare how the help offered so far by the candidates was unlikely to make a dent in the rises.
Truss’s plan to reverse the recent increase in national insurance contribution would save households on the lowest incomes an average of just 76p a month, it found. But it would leave the UK’s richest households better off by £93 a month.
In an article for the Times,
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