Winter fuel help on hold for 400,000 homes

ALMOST half a million homes will not get any help with their energy bills until spring as a result of government delays in rolling out their payments.

Furious MPS have ordered ministers to “pull out all the stops” and speed up the delivery of cash to households which are off the electricity grid.

There are around 400,000 families who still have not received any financial support because they are not directly connected to the power network.

They are due to get a £400 one-off payment, but the Government has privately admitted it will not arrive in their bank accounts until the end of March.

The latest delay means those people will have had to endure the entire winter without the support that has been available to most households.

Many of those affected live in mobile home parks, on boats moored by rivers and canals, or in isolated houses in the country’s most rural areas.

There have been reports that many of them have been cutting back on their usage during the recent cold snap, with potential consequences for their health.

On top of that, “hundreds of thousands” more homes which use oil or LPG gas for their heating still have not yet received a promised £200 payment.

David Jones, the Conservative MP for Clwyd West, said it was “deeply worrying” that support has not yet been provided to off-grid homes.

He warned that many of those affected already have to pay higher prices for their energy than the average household. “I’ve got a lot of constituents who are extremely concerned about this and wonder why they’ve been forgotten,” he said. “It is really rather disturbing that they haven’t put any measures in place yet to make the payments they’ve been promising these people for several weeks now.

“The Government should be doing everything they can to pull out all the stops so that people get the money.”

Liberal Democrat MPS yesterday sent a joint letter to Rishi Sunak urging him to look at the problem “as a matter of urgency”.

“Off-grid households are being disproportionately disadvantaged, an issue that is being dangerously exacerbated by the cost of living crisis,” they warned the Prime Minister. “Delaying their compensation until after the winter is counter-productive. Our constituents need this support now.”

Getting support to mobile homes has proved particularly difficult because power is supplied to them via a single point before being internally distributed to the dwellings on site.

That means that an entire park only appears on the system as one customer, which is technically eligible for just a single energy support payment.

The same is true for houseboats which use a single shared powerpoint. It means people in such situations have not received automatic deductions from their bills like those households with a direct electricity contract.

Ministers have been working with local councils to identify the households that are eligible, but there have been repeated delays in rolling out the payments.

In a briefing to MPS this week Graham Stuart, the Energy Minister, said the families affected will be able to apply for their £400 payment from February 27.