Have the recent price increases announced been blown out of all proportion ?
The average dual-fuel bill is going up to about £1400 per year.
I bet a lot of members spend more than that on Petrol every year , indeed I cough up more on cigarettes each year.
We still have amongst the cheapest prices in Europe yet we are still moaning.
Does anyone seriously believe prices would be lower had the industry not been privatised and still government run.
The rise is about £100 or less than the price of one Latte per week.
What's all the fuss about
Overall, domestic fuel has doubled since 2004, so this is bound to have a negative impact.
Also, don't forget that cold living conditions have a very real effect on exacerbating illnesses such as cardio vascular and respiratory disease, feeding into increased excess winter deaths, and this is particularly an issue as many of the most susceptible people on fixed incomes live in older inefficient properties which cost more to heat in the first place.
Also, i don't doubt that other countries pay more for their fuel, but they also tend to have a longer term, strategic outlook on the production of energy, i.e they don't have the problems of lack of gas storage and power stations coming off line with nothing to replace them with, both of which will lead to a lot of volatility of domestic prices here in the near future.
The fact that as a country, we seem to have to go begging cap-in-hand to foreign powers and multinationals, just to get a power station built, suggests to me that there is a problem with long term energy policy in this country.
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If the Government are so keen on insulation of properties, let those with the wish for this to occur do so by all means (as we have done at our own cost despite both of us being retired), but let us not forget that much of the social housing built by local authorities and now administered by housing associations fall into this category. Why should I be expected to pay a surcharge on my fuel bills to help those organisations ?
Certainly in my neck of the woods, public sector housing tends to be on average more energy efficient because it tends to be newer and suitable for cheaper insulation measures, and has already been subject to various insulation programmes over the years.
The bigger issues are with raising efficiency standards in low income private housing (particularly private rented) and older properties without cavity walls - and just to make things more difficult, there is a lot of overlap between these two sub-sectors.
The problem with funding energy efficiency measures through fuel tariffs is that those who need the help most are already paying proportionally more for their energy, even though they are in less of a position to do so. It would be less regressive to fund those programmes through general taxation.
