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Liz Truss would use an emergency budget in September to announce (among other things) how her government would help people with rising energy bills. On Friday Ofgem will announce what the energy price cap will be from October, and on the Today programme this morning an interview with three energy company bosses illustrated quite how dire the outlook is.
Greg Jackson, the founder and chief executive of the Octopus Energy, said the government had to help consumers because it was impossible for householders to meet rising costs on their own. He told the programme:
The big thing here is we need more help for customers from the government. The reality is customers are being asked to pay the price of gas, which is weaponised by Putin, and they shouldn’t be expected to do that alone.
Let’s put it in perspective. The UK’s energy bill is going from maybe £15bn in a normal year to £75bn pounds this year. And that’s the equivalent of maybe 9p or more on the base rate of income tax. No government would announce that, and in the same way, no government should let this go to customers.
This problem predates the Ukrainian war. We have a systemic failure in the energy market. The government does need to intervene. We shouldn’t expect customers to pay the cost of this failure and the Ukraine war …
The government simply needs to step in and pick up this cost like they did in the pandemic. We need £40bn to get through this winter. That’s 10% of what was spent during the pandemic and that’s the only thing that will really sort this problem out.
All through the summer, we’ve been hearing about customers in distress, customers who are worried that they’re not able to heat their homes over this coming winter. That’s why we’re saying to the government, you’ve got to take this decision to freeze prices at their current level right now.
This cannot wait until the 5th or 6th of September. The Conservative party needs to sort themselves out, decide who the leader is going to be this week, so that the Ofgem announcement on the 26th [the rise in the price cap for October] doesn’t have to happen. That is such an imperative.
