Wholesale gas prices are now cheaper than before the Russia-Ukraine war pushed them through the roof.

That fall in prices should be reflected in the cost to the consumer, of course:

But it won’t.

The article states:

Households should also expect their energy bills to remain stubbornly high through the coming winter, at almost double the rates paid in 2020, and remain above pre-pandemic levels for the rest of the decade, according to analysts at Cornwall Insight.

Prices are not expected to return to pre-2020 levels until the end of the decade at the earliest – but no reason is given for that.

It is a fair point that energy sources are bought months in advance of their use, meaning that the current price falls will still take a few months to come to bear on our bills.

But this means that our bills should be capped at £1,000 or less by the end of 2023.

But they won’t. Why not?

Is this the privatised water fiasco being played out with a different national utility?

Water isn’t rare (yet) but the system was privatised on the understanding that bills would become cheaper and investment would go into modernising the water/sewage network and neither of those things have happened.

Instead, £66 billion have been taken from the public (we all need water) and given to shareholders as profit, while the privatised firms have gone around £54 billion into debt. Absolutely no effort has gone into modernising the network at all.

Now, the outcry over the pumping of sewage into our waterways has forced the water firms to agree they will modernise the system – at a cost of £10 billion (so, much less than has been given away to shareholders, and therefore an amount that could have been withheld from their dividends) that will be paid by water customers.

Clearly, greed has overtaken service provision in the boardrooms of the water firms.

Moving back to the energy firms: they have been making money hand over fist in the time since energy prices hit the roof. I’m not sure I understand how they have managed this.

If wholesale prices are coming down below what they were immediately before the Russia-Ukraine war, then it seems likely those profits will evaporate.

How do they keep the money flowing in? The answer seems clear: keep the price to the consumer artificially high.

That, I think, is the reason energy prices to the consumer will remain high, despite the cost to the companies coming down.

Ofgem, the regulator, has a responsibility to set a cap on energy prices, so it would be reasonable to ask what’s going on there.

If it isn’t going to hold the companies to their duty – providing energy to the public in the most cost-effective way possible – shouldn’t it be replaced by an organisation that will?

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