With the Government effectively taking over Bulb, the cost to the taxpayer just to get the former Bulb and its customers through this winter is at least £1 billion, with no exit strategy planned after winter.
Personally I would prefer £1 billion of taxpayers money to be spent on things like free school meals during school holidays. And if that means former Bulb customers pay more for gas and electricity then so be it.
I don't get compensation from the Government if a badly made car a buy breaks down beyond repair forcing me to replace it at a higher cost. So why should taxpayers money effectively be used to support former Bulb customers because the company was badly run and didn't hedge their price risk?
That's a very fair point, but what else can they do if there's nobody else to take over 1.7m customers? It sounds like this was a direct result of government policy over price caps, so what alternative could there be? If they were to suddenly scrap the price caps, that would cause huge chaos across the board and then negate any confidence in similar government guarantees in the future. If you have a safety net that gets removed at the very moment you need it most, you never had a safety net in the first place.
I suppose there's a sort of parallel with your car analogy in what we saw with Rover: if a few individuals have problems with their cars, nobody cares, but when huge numbers of people are affected - motorists, workers, suppliers - something has to happen from the top.
We simply can't just leave 1.7m households without gas and electricity. Also, don't forget that all those Bulb customers aren't Lloyds Names: they're just ordinary folk. There will be plenty amongst them who could easily afford to pay more, but equally, there will be loads of the very people in poverty and desperately relying on those free school meals that you mention.