Price Cap - Just announced

[swifttwist]

From £1971 to £3549. 80% rise. I have no words.

New figures:

Electricity
£0.52 per kWh
Daily standing charge: £0.46

Gas:
£0.15 per kWh
Daily standing charge: £0.28

Why are they bitching at him? What can the possibly have to say if he’s trying to help? 😯

This is like some kind of dystopian nightmare we're living right now. Brexit with all the division and anger and discord, Covid, The Cost of Living Crisis, extortionate food and petrol prices, rail and bus strikes, huge delays at ferry ports and airports, shops and banks closing one after the other on the high streets!!! WTF next?

The energy is not even gonna STAY that amount. It will keep going up... and up. Every year. It's terrifying.

BUT, as a few posters have said, this is the absolute top end that anyone will pay, and many people will pay quite a lot less than that. Me and DH are on pre-payment meters - (they were here when we moved in, but I never got round to changing them, and got used to them. I kinda like being in control tbh.)

Yeah I know you technically pay more with prepay, but our bills have been much lower at this cottage than they used to be in our other houses with credit meters, even with prepay, as we are more careful with it coz we can see the money dwindling on the meters!!! (DD left shortly after we moved in, so that's probably skewed the figures a bit.)

I don't think the bills will stay quite so low much longer though!!! But I genuinely don't think they will be £350 a month. At the moment, the electric is about £70 a month, and the gas is peanuts, like £15 a month coz we haven't used it for 4 months - except the cooker 3 or 4 times a week for half hour at a time. (Coz it's been summer.) Oh and we use the hot water for a few minutes a day

We pay about £35 a month for gas over the year, and around £70 a month on electric. So we currently pay around £105 a month for energy, and this is after the first rise we had in April. Was about 35-40% less before that. I reckon we will be paying £170-£180 a month by mid winter. But not £300 as the price cap suggests.

Also, I don't think it's as bad as some were expecting - BUT it's still very high, and is gonna go up again next Springtime. HOWEVER, as I and some others have said, NOT EVERYONE will be paying this amount! Many will be paying quite a bit less.

Nevertheless, some will be paying it, and the Government needs to step in and help people.

Yes it is a strange argument. They should've let the old and vulnerable die of covid 🤔

Fromdownwest without lockdowns and vaccines covid survival rate which I would like to see your source on would not be so high - just saying

If you were 80 and didn't pay your electric bill do you really think electricity companies will allow you to rack up debt for another 5 or 10 years?

I do actually. And I think the media will be stuffed with stories about people in exactly that situation this winter.

If you are using 65 a month then of course that is what you will pay, but if you are using less than that incl standing charge (highly unlikely with bills as they are) you would not have a 65 per month minimum payment. You pay for what you use, DD are simply a way of managing and spreading payments. Some suppliers give a v small discount for paying by DD as it helps their admin costs but the DD itself can be any figure and that will have no impact on what you are charged. You pay for what you use. I find it scary how many people seem to think that when they are given a DD figure that that is a figure that is fixed, it's not and never has been. You use more you pay more, you use less you pay less.

there is no one-size fits all, and depends if/when your provider increases prices to the cap. But if they do it immediately then

7536 electric x 52p - approx £4,000
31250 gas x 15p - £4,700

those are quite high so check they're correct (could be a big house of course). Average 3 bed home is supposed to be roughly 5000kwh electric and 12000 gas.

Also bear in mind thats october's fix spread over a year. The prices are expected to go up again in January and again again in April. So that estimate won't hold, it will increase. (sorry)

I wished I lived in your cottage.

We are paying a lot more.

I love how you jump to anti-vax as a standard retort. I am fully vaccinated.

Conversely - please can you show me some independent studies that lockdowns saved lives. NET lives, if you could include a reasoning for the excess mortality that would be a bonus. Not hyperbole, actual numerically backed evidence that locking down a country worked to save lives.

Many did ages ago because the market was too volatile for them to be able to offer a deal. Some have restarted them, others not. But I think the vast majority will only be for existing clients, so you'd need to log into your account.

There are about 27m households in the UK and 32m taxpayers. So each taxpayer would not be paying a “couple of quid” extra. Each taxpayer would have to pay for approx one household’s worth of energy. Which is what is happening anyway because people pay for their own household.

Sorry you think I am being unhelpful but every thread on this forum about energy is littered with people who have no understanding of their usage, what a unit cost is, what a DD is, that the price cap doesn't mean that it's the maximum they will pay (except on a unit cost basis), who think that 'fixing' your DD means your will not have to pay more than that figure. This is partly down to poor reporting but also down to people not paying any attention to how their bill is constructed.

If people did the basic maths required to work out their bill rather than expect someone else to do it for them, people would have a much better idea of what they are paying for and what the changes mean. Maybe you are not one of these people but given that you seem not to have taken even the most basic steps to discover the information yourself, I suspect you might be. Apologies if I am wrong.

They money would just get muddled up in the cess pit that is the UK fiscal system!

@IrishladyNE

are you on a fixed deal?

if you are just check your deal doesn't require you to pay by Dd or you might lose your deal & go onto the SVR & possibly be paying more.

no one wants their children to be cold, but most are looking at Warner clothing, layers, blankets & other options to keep their usage down.

No 350 a month is not the absolute top end that anyone will pay! How are people still getting this so so wrong.

Markets have failed and households and businesses can't access the fuel that they need at an affordable price due to wider international problems.

Government must step in

We need two lots of big investment from government; medium term investment to improve UK energy security by being able to generate what we need and short term support to ensure that energy bills remain affordable until energy security is achieved.

We also probably need some more nuclear power plants, as part of this, and they will have to go somewhere

Frustrating isn’t it.

I think the language around the “cap” has completely confused people.

As @Eastangular2000 says

No 350 a month is not the absolute top end that anyone will pay! How are people still getting this so so wrong.

and if the news/energy suppliers were better at explaining that rather than fixating on constantly talking about the 'cap' along with the big '£3500' figure, maybe peopel would. The BBC website this morning had NO mention of the price per unit anywhere on their page. I had to go to the ofgem page and even there is wasn't on the homepage - it was under a link out to a second page not clearly marked with unit prices.

It is an important point and I wish the news was reporting it better

Would you go with a fix that works out as 8% higher than the price cap? Its gas standing charge 27.22 and unit rate 15.19 and elec standing charge 48.15 and unit rate 60.35. it's a year fix. So will cost more until January but then may be cheaper than later price cap rises

Exactly this, sadly the net zero needs to be shelved for a while, until this stabilises.

Pointless exercise anyhow, with China chucking out co2 by the tonne. Like chucking a deck chair off the titantic.

This is not sustainable for businesses as well. They do not have the cap they can be charged and at any rate, if they cannot afford it, there are no opportunities for wage increases but job losses. Reading Martin Lewis predications it goes up again. Currently we are not being governed - this crisis should have instigated a Cobra emergency meeting and tax rate reduction is not the way forward - I really do not understand what OFGEM do.

Taken from the website
CONFIRMED
1 October 2022 to 31 December 2022
UP 80% It'll rise to £3,549/year on typical use.
This is up massively from Ofgem's prediction in May of a 42% rise to £2,800/year on typical use – which is what the Government based its cost of living support package on.

1 January 2023 to 31 March 2023
Prediction UP 52%, according to the latest prediction (Friday 26 August) from analysts at Cornwall Insight. £5,387/year on typical use.

1 April 2023 to 30 June 2023
Weak prediction UP 23% based on Cornwall Insight predictions. £6,616/year on typical use.

1 July 2023 to 30 September 2023
Weak prediction DOWN 11% based on Cornwall Insight predictions. £5,897/year on typical use.

It's just the two of us in our house (three bed ex-council terrace) and at the start of this year we qualified for the government's external wall insulation scheme, so I'm just crossing everything that the new insulation does its job. To be honest though, we need new windows in every room so I'm not holding my breath We pay £120pm for gas and electricity and the account is about £300 in credit, which is going to be wiped out when the price increases.

We've each got a heated throw that we can use instead of putting the heating on, I have an Aldi knock-off Oodie and I'm already having sandwiches for dinner rather than using the oven. I work from home so I'm limited in how much I can cut back during the day but I'll do my best.

I recently got a disabled bus pass so I'm also trying to use that more, to offset fuel costs and save some cash there.

Agreed. The market has failed. A large part of this is being caused by global events, so we can’t rely on companies to sort this out, The government needs to step in. But it’s asleep at the wheel.

Can I just cheerfully remind you that it's due to increase again in January.
This is the amount from Oct 1st to January.

We are so goosed.

I don't even think there's much point in giving people money to help with the bills, if the fundamental problem isn't going away.
What could the government be spending billions on to provide energy for the UK consumer? Building energy production systems: nuclear, wind, solar, tidal, storage.

The government could have more grants for insulation - or lower the price massively to enable it to be done. Our last job is to insulate under the floor. Not at the cost of £4000-6000 as mentioned in the EPC but to do it ourselves by crawling under the floor and fitting it. The cost of insulation has increased several times since we started looking at this project.
There is a suggested saving I think of £67.