As snow blankets the land and the Winter Fuel Payment is cut for 10million pensioners, we’ve learned that household energy prices will rise yet again in the new year. Just in time for the coldest part of winter.
This morning, regulator Ofgem increased the energy price cap to £1,738 a year from January 1.
That’s an increase of 1% from the current £1,717 cap and will add another £21 to the average annual energy bill for British households.
It follows a 10% to increase to the cap, which came into force on October 1. This will only intensify the hardship millions of pensioners face in the coming months, and makes Labour’s move to axe the Winter Fuel Payment look even more brutal than it already did.
Amazingly, that was Labour’s first big decision after 14 years in the political wilderness.
Why they thought that was the best place to start, only chancellor Rachel Reeves can say. I bet even she regularly asks herself: “What was I thinking?”
Perhaps Labour was punishing pensioners for refusing to vote for them.
Scrapping the Winter Fuel Payment was a defining moment for Keir Starmer’s Labour. Charities warn it could kill 4,000 pensioners this winter.
And still Starmer and Reeves refuse to reinstate it.
Caroline Abrahams, director at Age UK, said the losing the Winter Fuel Payment then seeing gas and electricity bills rise not once but twice will hit pensioners hard.
She said it’s the latest in a series of blows for millions of pensioners living on low or modest incomes, who are now “hoping against hope that something will turn up”.
So what might that be?
Octopus Energy boss Greg Jackson has suggested pensioners struggling with their energy bills get hold of an electric blanket.
Jackson means well and to be fair, Octopus is shipping out 65,000 free electric blankets. But it’s not the same.
Others have aimed even crankier ideas at pensioners, such as shoving crisp packets behind radiators to reflect heat back into the room.
Has the UK really come to this?
Labour’s own analysis has found that scrapping the Winter Fuel Payment could force 100,000 pensioners in England and Wales into fuel poverty this year.
I thought Labour was the party of the poor. Not when it comes to pensioners.
Even more worryingly, analysts at Cornwall Insight have warned prices are unlikely to fall significantly in the future.
The UK is more reliant on energy imports than almost any major country, leaving us at the mercy of volatile wholesale gas prices.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband seems hellbent on making our situation even worse, by mothballing the UK’s North Sea oil and gas fields.
That’s something no other country is doing. It’s sheer madness.
I suppose shivering pensioners can console themselves that they’re doing their bit to save the planet.
Millions of pensioners are facing a cold Christmas and not just because of the Winter Fuel Payment. All those cost-of-living payments that former Conservative PM Rishi Sunak shipped out have been halted. They say the Tories are the nasty party, but they’ve got nothing on Starmer’s cold-hearted Labour.