Energy bill ‘cap’ is just a cruel joke

Theresa May’s election manifesto, we are told, will pledge a cap on our bills from those rapacious energy companies, forcing them to reduce their charges by an average £100 a year. This is supposed to be a vote winner. But what it overlooks is the picture recently revealed by the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), projecting the soaring cost over the next five years of all those “green” levies and taxes created to promote the Government’s drive to “decarbonise” our economy.

These are set almost to double from last year’s figure, to an annual £16.5 billion, of which easily the largest component will be the £11.8 billion we shall all be paying under the “renewables obligation”, to subsidise wind and solar farms and the burning of “biomass”, mainly wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic to replace the much cheaper, supposedly “dirty”, coal which by then will have been almost phased out.

Put all these costs together and, according to the OBR they will by 2021 total £72.6 billion, an annual average of £14.5 billion. This equates to £558 a year for every home in the land, most of which will be paid in one way or another through our energy bills. So when we see from that Tory manifesto how much they are promising to cut our bills, we should remember by how much they are also proposing to increase them, without telling us about it.

Saving £100 a year by paying £558 may not sound quite the bargain of the century. But at least we shall have the comfort of knowing that we are helping to save the planet from that global warming so much in evidence lately, by meeting our obligations under the insane Climate Change Act, which no party in the next Parliament has any intention of repealing.