Money: Liz Truss wants government help with energy bills to benefit rich people – who don’t need it – more than the hard-working poor who do.

Liz Truss is proving to be “Continuity Johnson” in her first major challenge as prime minister – by helping the rich with their energy bills far more than the poor.

Remember when Boris Johnson’s government promised to give £400 to every household, to help with their energy bills – and we found this meant rich people who owned more than one house would receive the payment multiple times, despite only living in one dwelling at a time?

Now, according to the Resolution Foundation, Liz Truss is offering more than twice as much support to the rich as to the poor, to deal with the same crisis.

Here‘s the BBC with the details:

The Resolution Foundation said if the government cuts National Insurance and limits energy bill rises, richer homes will get £4,700 in 2023, compared to £2,200 for the poorest.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) recently described the support package as “very poorly targeted”.

“Finding a way of targeting [support] to the many, many millions who really need it, without giving it to the many, many millions who don’t, appears to be something that has stumped the Treasury and the government.”

Consumer affairs correspondent Colletta Smith added this analysis:

Although most households had been facing the same huge price increase in October, those price rises do not affect everyone in the same way. Those with less money spend proportionately more of their income on energy, and are likely to have smaller properties to heat, which means they won’t save as much with this guarantee, and will still struggle to pay bills at the current rate.

There will be what the government is calling a “fiscal event” this month, and the pressure is mounting on the government to provide more detail and more targeted help for the poorest households. Although this was the first announcement of Liz Truss’s premiership, the scale and the repercussions mean that it is likely to be the economically defining one.

If this is indeed the defining moment of Liz Truss’s premiership, it seems likely to define her as funnelling money to the undeserving rich when it should have gone to the hard-working poor who need it.

A general election is only two years away, and her decision on energy now is likely to affect us during both winters leading up to it; we aren’t going to forget this.

By concentrating her support on the rich, Truss may have doomed her entire political movement.

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