Having been promised an energy price freeze, millions of hard-pressed families will be shocked and fearful when, on 1 October, they are hit with a 25% rise in their fuel bills.
After a summer of doing nothing the government looked as if it had done a lot, but it has not done anywhere near enough. In 10 days’, the cap on energy bills will rise to an unprecedented £2,500 a year. This is an average increase of £10 a week, on top of April’s rise of £14 a week. Fuel costs will, according to Jonathan Bradshaw and Antonia Keung at York University, consume an unprecedented 20% of the income of 4.1 million families in October. By May, that figure could rise to 7.4 million. For 2.2 million families, energy bills will take up an unpayable 30% of their income, and this could rise to 3.8 million families by May.
Never has fuel poverty hit so many people so hard, and unless new help is announced for low-income families on Friday, Liz Truss’s £150bn energy package will remain so poorly targeted that it will not prevent 5 million children falling into poverty this winter, and an ever larger proportion of our nation from turning up at one of the country’s 3,000 food banks. » | Gordon Brown | Wednesday, September 21, 2022
