This new gas price proposal is bonkers

[whenwillthemadnessend]

Tying us into a possible 20 year loan at a cost of 90-130 billion with no guarantee of future gas prices and no incentive for people to change behaviour to save gas save money and save the planet

I may be dead in 20 years and my kids will be paying this off for ever plus covid.

It's the worst idea ever!!!!

Well we either pay it ourselves as 'customers' or the government borrows even more hundreds of billions of pounds which we pay back as 'tax payers'.

Either way it's us who'll be paying in the long term. The government can't magically reduce the market price of fuel.

Given people cannot pull an extra £200‐£500 a month out our arses and something like 50% of the country will enter fuel poverty I think it's the best option for us.

Personally I think the wholesale gas companies could find at least part of it with a windfall tax.

Long term gas projections,and how they will be affected well I just dont know.

What I do know is people will be dying from cold and this is a worse community issue than covid ever was. The pandemic pales in comparison to the energy crisis yet no one blinked twice at the insane costs of furlough, where we paid people to sit on their arses and bake banana bread.

I was born in 63 and paid for WW2 until l was 43, despite being born nearly 20 years after it ended.

How else would you suggest we pay for it? People in here are always bleating about ‘my children paying it off’ Did people say this at the start of WW1 and WW 2, which cost a lot more than this and Covid combined?

It's the fact that this does nothing to change behaviour that I'm
More frustrated about the wasted opportunity to change things for the kids and the planet.

We all need to cut back regardless of the cost. Both business and home use

There’s still an incentive to save energy. Won’t be many people who want to pay today’s prices if they can help it. There’ll just be longer to look at more energy efficient boilers and white goods etc.

I do kind of see your point in that there has to be a societal move in terms of using less energy.

however, I live in a part of the UK where fuel poverty this winter is expected to reach 96% and a household income of £104k required to avoid it.

if it’s capped I’m turning the fucking heating on.

Well said

If this price cap doesn’t happen millions of people will be unable to heat their homes, millions will have no spare money to spend anywhere else which will lead on to hundreds of thousands of business closing. This will all result in huge job loses, millions claiming benefits and lower tax receipts going to the government to pay for all of our services.

So whilst it’s a very drastic and expensive thing to do, I don’t see an alternative. (And it will only cost the same as H2).

We don't all need to cut back, high energy users without a legitimate disability, health or age related reason for high usage do.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

There will be people that need to cut back, and hopefully this whole debacle will make people more aware of their usage. I know I certainly am more aware and I wasnt a high usage person before.

But this is a crisis of epic proportions, to expect families and businesses to pay these prices is absurd!

A tiered pricing system with the first x kwh at a lower price would encourage people to cut back. Different cut off or else assistance for vulnerable people with genuine high energy needs.

Nor are we

How else would you suggest we pay for it? People in here are always bleating about ‘my children paying it off’ Did people say this at the start of WW1 and WW 2, which cost a lot more than this and Covid combined?

different demographics then though

All this is doing is protecting company profits. Ridiculous

All this is doing is protecting company profits.

there is that

I think the standing charge should be abolished or much lowered. I can see the argument that high unit prices encourage energy saving behaviour. However even the most frugal people are landed with this flat fee without being able to do anything about it!

No one mentioned demographics when l was paying for it. I didn’t even know l was paying for it until l was about 40.

I don’t particularly want my children saddled with it as a debt, but how else do we do it?

Or they could tax the companies that have made billion pound profits?

A tiered tariff would have affected people who can afford to pay, so it'd never happen.

They can do what labour/Lib Dems suggested and use a windfall tax on energy companies.

Tories will want the normal folk to pay though, of course, one way (loan to customers) or the other (as taxpayers)

Quite.

Liz Truss does not give a shit about me, you or any voter - just big business.

This is from taxjustice.net/2020/06/09/slavery-compensation-uk-questions/

"It’s hard to believe but it was only in 2015 that, according to the Treasury, British taxpayers finished ‘paying off’ the debt which the British government incurred in order to compensate British slave owners in 1835 because of the abolition of slavery. Abolition meant their profiteering from human misery would (gradually) come to an end. Not a penny was paid to those who were enslaved and brutalised."

I agree OP. We need to stop wasting fuel. Why should people be rescued by the government (which just means other tax payers, not a magic money tree) so they can sit at home in t shirts with the heating whacked up full? Where people who try to manage their spending and reduce use of energy are penalised by paying off debts for the rest of their lives?

There must be an alternative solution - increasing the already agreed payment to an extra amount over Dec/Jan would be better so at least everyone would be able to afford a baseline necessary amount and then would be rewarded if they cut down extraneous usage.

Agree OP it's total madness