Claim your share of £40m unused energy vouchers, Shapps urges Londoners
HUNDREDS of thousands of Londoners were today urged to claim their share of around £40 million in unused energy support vouchers.
Energy Security Secretary Grant Shapps issued the appeal as the Government stepped up action to ensure people on pre-payment meters do not miss out on the money.
As of April 1, 2.1 million of the vouchers had been sent out in the capital, with more than 650,000 of them yet to be used, worth around £44 million.
They are each worth around £66, and eligible households, mainly those using pre-payment meters, can get six of them up until a June 30 deadline.
Given that the city has the lowest take-up rate in Britain of just 68 per cent, Mr Shapps told Londoners: “Claim what you are owed. Still time to do it — but people do need to take action.”
He stressed that the low take-up rate in the capital of the vouchers had been “causing concern” and that it may be down to factors such as people in urban areas moving more and the number of households in the city with English as a second language. People may not realise they can claim the money, he added, or emails may have gone to their spam folder, or they may have seen a text but forgotten about it.
“If you use a pre-payment meter and you have not been taking that physical voucher, or voucher sent to you by text or email, to the Post Office or to PayPoint, then you may be about to lose potentially £400 so check that you have claimed and if you haven’t, claim,” he explained.
In a wide-ranging interview, Mr Shapps also urged Londoners to inject impetus into Britain’s race to net zero by choosing a green tariff when new deals return to the energy market this summer.
The Net Zero Secretary stressed that individuals could themselves “encourage renewable energy to be produced” by opting for these green deals. “There is no reason not to do it,” he told The Standard, emphasising that renewable energy tariffs could be “just as cheap, or even cheaper” than other offers.
Mr Shapps expects “proper competition” to return to the energy market within months after wholesale prices fell “very significantly”.
Last week, it emerged that households will be more than £400 a year better off on average from July after the cap on energy bills was slashed.
Energy regulator Ofgem set the cap at £2,074 a year, down from £3,280 from April to July. That is well below the Government’s £2,500 Energy Price Guarantee. Currently, most people are on their energy firm’s standard or default tariff but new fixed deals are expected to be offered soon.
As the UK increasingly decarbonises, Mr Shapps hailed London’s transport system as “on the whole pretty much the envy of the rest of the country”.
But he was highly critical of Sadiq Khan expanding the Ulez across the whole of London as part of efforts to improve the environment.
“I don’t think the way to do it is to browbeat people into it,” he said.