Before you do anything else, watch this – it’s Martin Lewis explaining what the energy price cap change in July will actually mean to you:

So the first thing you need to know is that the drop in average bills from £2,500 to £2,074 is meaningless to you because you’re probably not paying the average. You would be better-off looking at it as a 17 per cent fall and working out what that means for your personal bill – after removing the standing charges, of course.

Yes, the standing charges are remaining the same, meaning you’ll pay around £300 next year, just to be able to have electricity and gas in your home. So people using less energy can’t save much by cutting their usage.

There is a consultation on the possibility of cutting the standing charge but we need to remember that our energy firms are greedy and will do their best to keep prices as high as possible, no matter what that means to you.

In the autumn and winter, bills are likely to rise again, we’re being told. This strikes me as strange, because the energy firms buy their fuel “many months in advance”. Note that we aren’t being told how many months in advance they buy it.

If, for example, it’s seven months, then in December the price of energy should be the cheapest it’s been in two years, because of this:

Energy firms have historically claimed that they “smooth out” the fluctuating cost of their product by averaging out the price over a long period of time, as well.

But This Writer has doubts when energy analysts like Cornwall Insight say further price cuts are unlikely, especially if there’s a cold winter and the UK has to compete with other countries to buy fuel.

I thought we were supposed to be buying our fuel months, or even years, in advance.

So shouldn’t the energy price this winter be extremely low?

I think we need explicit clarity on this – I mean actual, black-and-white figures showing exactly what electricity and gas have been costing the energy firms, exactly how they’ve been “smoothing out” that cost (and between what dates) and why they are apparently failing to pass on the current savings.

How are their profits at the moment? What are they projected to be over the next year?

It seems to me that we – the consumers – are being ripped off brazenly.

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