Tag Archives: energy

How do ‘community cooking events’ help us cope with rising energy bills?

It’s being reported that the government is putting £842 million more pounds into the Household Support Fund, which is said to help struggling families deal with the cost of living including food and energy costs.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will be dividing the money among English councils, which must use it to help people pay for energy bills or groceries.

The funding is said to be targeted at areas of the country “with the most vulnerable households” and it is being left up to the councils to decide how to spend it.

What I want to know is…

How is a ‘community cooking event’ or an ‘energy cafe’ – both ideas used by English councils – the best way to divide up this cash? Even voucher schemes and ‘energy saving packs’ spend money redundantly.

Wouldn’t it be better simply to provide the cash to those who need it most, and let them decide how to spend it?

The way this scheme is being (mis)managed, it seems to be an attempt to keep cash away from vulnerable families, rather than helping them.

Source: DWP issues update on new cash for hundreds of thousands to help with rising energy bills

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Jeremy Hunt may extend £2,500 energy price guarantee in major climbdown

Smirking Hunt: did he know he was going to do this all along?

After saying he would not provide any more help for households to pay their energy bills, it seems Jeremy Hunt is preparing to do just that.

The Express is reporting that he will extend the government’s £2,500 energy price guarantee for three months, until wholesale energy prices fall below the current Ofgem price cap in July, as they are expected to do.

Previously, the price guarantee was set to be raised to £3,000 in what would have been a £500 rise in energy bills for the average household.

It still represents an increase of £400, as the government’s grant that has kept bills down until now is ending at the beginning of April.

If the claim is true, it will be a major victory for Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis, who had petitioned the government to use some expected savings to protect households.

As This Site stated in February,

According to Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis, when the announcement that the price guarantee would rise by 20 per cent was made in Hunt’s Autumn Statement, energy prices were significantly higher than they are now.

The current expectation is that in July, energy regulator Ofgem’s price cap (rather than the government’s price guarantee) will drop below both the £3,000 set to come in April and the £2,500 limit in force now, so we will all pay less.

This means the government is likely to save around £10 billion on what it was expecting to spend on the price guarantee at the time of the Autumn Statement.

Mr Lewis has written to the Chancellor, informing him of these expectations and calling on him to keep the price guarantee at its current level until July – a measure that will add only £1.5 billion to the current cost (leaving £8.5 billion in the kitty).

He has said this is better than inflicting poverty – and its devastating effects – on the people of the UK.

The Express is now saying the cost is likely to be £3 billion, which is fine because it still leaves £7 billion in expected savings.

Let’s look forward to confirmation of this move in the Budget statement on March 15.

Source: Jeremy Hunt ‘to extend £2,500 energy price guarantee’ for three months

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Tory energy minister blames Labour for his own government’s failings

Why do Tories insist on trying to mislead us on every slightest blunder they make, when we can find the facts easily anyway?

Here’s Graham Stuart, Tory Energy Minister, blaming the last Labour government – which ended in 2010 – for his own government’s lack of exertion in bringing energy bills down with insulation and heat pumps, and investment in renewables:

When asked by the Guardian if he would take responsibility on behalf of the government for sluggishness on insulation, heat pump installations and renewables investment, he refused and instead criticised the previous Labour government, which was last in office in 2010.

He said the Conservative action on energy efficiency “has been transformational since the rather dire position we inherited both on renewables and efficiency from Labour”.

And what are the facts?

The Guardian this week revealed that a third of the funding pledged by the UK government for insulation and installing heat pumps has not yet been spent, analysis has shown, despite the continuing energy bills and cost of living crises.

About £2.1bn remains unspent of the £6.6bn that was supposed to be used between 2020 and 2025 on making buildings more energy efficient and decarbonising heat. The funding is part of the £9.2bn that was promised for such spending in the Conservative general election manifesto of 2019.

The shadow climate minister, Kerry McCarthy, said: “Graham Stuart is living in a fantasy world. It was the Conservatives who crashed the market for onshore wind, costing British families £150 in higher bills. It was the Conservatives who gutted energy efficiency programmes, to the extent that installation rates are 20 times lower than under the last Conservative government. And it was Conservatives whose own net zero strategy is so poor that the UK’s own courts deemed it unlawful.

I think it’s going a bit far to say that the Tories’ failure on this has kept energy bills high, though, when the globalised energy giants like Shell and BP are charging us whatever they like because they get most of their cash abroad.

I mean, who owns the wind farms, apart from the King?

Source: UK energy minister blames Labour for soaring energy bills | Energy bills | The Guardian

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Energy bills WILL rise by £900 in April and the Tories don’t care

Burning your money: ironically, the next energy price hike will give the privatised providers even more of your money to burn.

It’s happening, then.

Despite Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis pleading with Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt to use a fraction of the money they’ll save when wholesale energy prices fall in July on cutting bills between April and then, the Tories have turned a deaf ear and are bent on further-impoverishing us all.

Let’s remember one very important fact:

There’s a lot of disgust with Ofgem for allowing the price to rocket:

But here’s the kicker:

Energy bills have risen 10 times faster than wages, but the government – Sunak and Hunt again – are keeping wages down and still funnelling cash to these big energy firms.

And let’s not forget that the Tories created these firms by privatising national utilities, back in the 1980s.

They said at the time that privatisation would allow more investment to go into the service, providing power to the nation at a cheaper price.

And people believed it!

Those were more innocent times. And, for “innocent”, read “naive”.

Anyway, there it is.

You need to find another £900 per year for energy, starting in 32 days’ time. That’s £500 for the new increase, plus £400 to make up for the Tory grant that has helped keep your bill down until now.

How are you going to do it?

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No more help for households, says Hunt, despite energy price cap rise in April

Grinning Hunt: the Chancellor won’t help families cope with energy price increases in April – not because he can’t, but because he doesn’t want to.

Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer and well-known misprint, has said he won’t provide any more help for households to pay for their energy bills.

This means the Tory government’s Energy Bills Support Scheme will end in March, just before the cap on our energy bills rises to an expected average of £3,000.

So we’re all facing a real-terms rise of £900 on our energy bills and Hunt will do nothing about it.

He has said,

“We constantly keep the help we can give families under review.

“But if you’re saying ‘Do I think we’re going to have the headroom to make a major new initiative to help people?’, I don’t think the situation would have changed very significantly from the Autumn Statement, which was just three months ago.”

This is not true.

According to Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis, when the announcement that the price guarantee would rise by 20 per cent was made in Hunt’s Autumn Statement, energy prices were significantly higher than they are now.

The current expectation is that in July, energy regulator Ofgem’s price cap (rather than the government’s price guarantee) will drop below both the £3,000 set to come in April and the £2,500 limit in force now, so we will all pay less.

This means the government is likely to save around £10 billion on what it was expecting to spend on the price guarantee at the time of the Autumn Statement.

That’s a pretty significant change, if you ask me!

Mr Lewis has written to the Chancellor, informing him of these expectations and calling on him to keep the price guarantee at its current level until July – a measure that will add only £1.5 billion to the current cost (leaving £8.5 billion in the kitty).

He has said this is better than inflicting poverty – and its devastating effects – on the people of the UK.

You can see him saying it here:

So it seems clear that Hunt has lied; he does have the headroom to help people with a new initiative, the situation has changed significantly and he can give more help to families.

He just doesn’t want to.

Remember this: the Conservative Chancellor would rather inflict poverty on you than do his job, which is to protect you from financial troubles that are no fault of your own.

Source: Jeremy Hunt says no more help for households despite energy bills increase in April

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Martin Lewis calls for government to hold energy prices down – and he has good cause

This is so simple, I’ll leave Mr Lewis to explain it:

The bit that sold this idea to me was that poverty is more costly to the nation in so many ways.

But Tories love inflicting poverty on us. Otherwise, why did they give away £700 billion to their rich friends during and after the Covid pandemic, thereby ensuring it would not be available to shore up public services and pay packets, and keep the cost of living down?

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How has Shell made £32bn profit from inflated energy prices?

I’m confused.

According to this BBC article, Shell should be paying 75 per cent of its UK profits to the government in taxes.

In a year when the firm has announced record profits (due to inflated energy prices caused by the Russia-Ukraine war) of £32 billion, that comes to £1.2 billion.

It was supposed to pay a 35 per cent Windfall Tax on its “extraordinary” earnings. That would have come to £560 million – but in fact it only paid $134 million (almost £109 million).

There’s an additional 30 per cent in Corporation Tax, which should bring in £480 million, and a supplementary 10 per cent rate that should bring in £80 million. I notice the BBC piece is silent about whether that happened.

And gas and oil firms like Shell are allowed to reduce the amount of tax they pay by the cost of decommissioning projects like North Sea oil platforms and investments in other UK projects.

Meanwhile, the Tory government’s Energy Bills Support Scheme is costing the public £15 billion. The windfall tax was supposed to help fund it – but how many firms pay into it, and how much are they paying, if they are allowed to claw back so many millions?

The government hopes to make £14 billion per year – which is not enough to cover its costs.

And underlying all of this is the elephant in the room: how are these firms being allowed to make such huge profits in the first place?

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‘Every action becomes a TRANSaction’: the cost of living crisis is putting a price tag on everything

High energy costs have forced 6.7 million homes into fuel poverty – expected to rise to 8.4 million homes in April.

It means increasing numbers of households are checking their smart meters before doing anything that might cost money.

Campaigners are calling for the government to introduce a special “social energy tariff” to make it easier to afford heating:

And there has been a knock-on effect: shop sales over the Christmas period are down – by around 50 per cent in some cases:

It’s only to be expected.

If you starve working people of cash, as the government has by cutting real-terms wages, and then charge them a fortune for the basic necessities of life, then they won’t have any spare readies for non-essential items.

Shops are going to go out of business, worsening the current recession, and overbalancing the economy into collapse.

But the Tory government doesn’t seem to care.

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Government support for business energy bills set to be halved from April

Businesses may go bust after April this year, because the government is halving the amount of money it is providing to support them with their energy bills.

The total level of government support is expected to fall by more than half from the £18.4bn the current six-month scheme is estimated to have cost by the time it ends.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt told industry leaders last week that the current scheme to support businesses was “unsustainably expensive”.

So the scheme, which caps the unit cost of gas and electricity for all businesses, will be replaced at the beginning of April with a new scheme that offers a discount on wholesale prices rather than a fixed price. The new scheme is expected to run until March 2024.

Hunt was challenged on the usefulness of the scheme – but claimed that the government’s aim was to bring down inflation because that would have a better benefit for business.

And he said Ofgem had been tasked with investigating whether the system was working properly because it was understood that firms are not yet benefiting from falls on the wholesale cost of gas:

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Zahawi asks nurses to take pay cut as ‘message to Putin’

Nadhim Zahawi: He claimed public money to heat his stables but he thinks nurses will accept another huge pay cut if he tells them it will help defeat Russian Premier Vladimir Putin.

Minister Without Portfolio Nadhim Zahawi has asked nurses to accept a real-terms pay cut “to send a message to Putin” that the UK will not accept his attempt to dictate to us using energy prices.

What?

Well, see for yourself:

Firstly, this is a non-sequitur. Nurses’ pay has nothing to do with energy prices or what has happened to them because of the war in Ukraine. What message would Putin really take from the UK government denying its underpaid nurses a decent pay rise?

Secondly, let us remember that this is the Tory MP who claimed a large amount of money – on expenses, so it came from the public purse – in order to keep his horses warm during the winter by heating his stables.

He has no right at all to preach to people who are having to go to food banks, simply to be able to eat.

What is he having to go without, to aid the resistance against Putin?

Nothing. And that is precisely what’s wrong with this massive hypocrite.

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