ITV says Ofgem expects prices cap to be £2,800 in October, up from £1,971 now - how will we manage

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Just saw ITV talking about the Head of Ofgem writing to Rishi Sunak today to inform him the price cap is expected to be £2,800 in October, up from £1,971. That's 1k increase. It was £1,277 in October 2021. How are we and other people going to manage. Is the UK really going to hit a massive recession now? What is BofE going to do about interest rates - inflation will hit the roof. Feeling very scared about the future now

Yep you can see the regional rates here (click on 'prices vary by region'). That's why I said average as the price cap is even more complicated and less like the simplistic 'an increase of £800' figure used in the media.

In Yorkshire our current rates are:
Electricity
Unit rate: 27.36p per kWh
Standing charge: 48.53p per day

Gas
Unit rate: 7.28p per kWh
Standing charge: 27.22p per day

The biggest worry is that the government seem clueless as to what to do. Apart from trying to privatise the BBC and Channel 4 and getting themselves into a deeper and deeper hole over partygate, I really can't see what they actually do. Boris seems more and more like Nero.

I'll preface this by saying I know the tories would never ever do something like this because it goes against their core principles but....

The government could look at redistributing wealth. The top 1% have enough personal wealth to give every single household in the UK £2k a year, every year, for for the next 40 years, and STILL retain around £1,000,000,000,000 between them (approx £15 m for each individual in the 1% if spilt evenly).

That's the scale of wealth inequality we've in allowed to happen in the UK and until that is addressed the masses will always struggle.

Don't ever put on the heating, use blankets/ heated throws. Cook lots of food at the same time then re heat in the microwave. Use a slow cooker when possible. Turn off lights whenever possible. Unplug everything you can.

The price cap still applies to per-unit cost, I think. The "typical user" amount of £2800 is for illustration purposes only.

The figures on the EST page are from April onwards. E.g. for a detached house £1,700-£2,800. The rise in october is again on top.

I saw an article on that recently. Apparently shoplifting has rapidly increased, and a lot of it is being perpetrated by first time offenders.

Cost-of-living crisis sparks boom in 'first time' shoplifters with supermarket bosses saying theft levels are 'off the charts'
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10842507/Cost-living-crisis-sparks-boom-time-shoplifters.html

Most of the hardship and fuel poverty stems from the UK government's commitment to Net-Zero Carbon. We have gas and coal under our own feet, but the UK government refuses to let it be fracked/mined and burned. Instead, the government have allowed us to become dependent on expensive imported gas, wind turbines that require a secondary generation system for when the wind doesn't blow (the secondary system is often gas fired), and wood chips that have to be shipped across the Atlantic ocean (burning huge amounts of heavy fuel oil in cargo ships).

None of this will end until people stop voting for the parties that support Net-Zero Carbon. That means we've all got to stop voting for Labour, Liberal Democrats, Green, and the Conservative and Unionist Party. And I'm sure many people on here dislike him, but Nigel Farage is the only one fighting these energy prices, by proposing a referendum on Net-Zero Carbon.

Nigel Farage's new drive for vote to kill off Boris's 'ruinous' green agenda: He got us out of the EU… Now the former UKIP chief demands a referendum on Net Zero
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10581529/Nigel-Farage-campaign-Net-Zero-policy-referendum.html

And this is called shooting your own feet to save a penny.

They are not clueless. Far from it. They know eactly what to do.

1. Cut the VAT on energy to zero (when was heating and hot water ever a luxury?).


2. Remove all the green levies from energy bills.


3. Start fracking the gas we have right here in the UK and mining the coal we have right here in the UK

But none of that will happen, because they've promised their masters at the WEF that they'll force Net-Zero Carbon on us. And as I stated above, nothing will change until people stop voting for Labour, Liberal Democrats, Green, and the Conservative and Unionist Party.

OK. So how bad does it have to get under the Net-Zero Carbon madness before you reconsider? Would £5000 a year on electricity be too high?

This is like investing in stables for horses when the car was being invented.

I am sure there were some people yelling about how expensive cars were and how we should rely on good old horses. Indeed when the car assembly line was first invented, cars were unaffordable for the average person. Gas will be phased out eventually anyway and UK is hardly the only country to be doing this.

Our standing charge is far higher than other parts of the country, they need to sort that out!

Well, seeing as you seem to like analogies:

Building wind turbines was like investing in a car when there are no reliable supplies of petrol.

Every single wind turbine needs a secondary system for when the wind doesn't blow. That's why going green is so expensive! At any one time we are paying for two systems to be built and maintained! The wind turbines argument is mostly ideological. It certainly doesn't make sense economically, scientifically, or from an engineering perspective.

If we wanted reliable, predictable green power, we should have gone for tidal. Unlike wind it's completely predictable for hundreds of years in advance, and we have a large coastline to do it. The fact we haven't, and instead went for unreliable, unpredictable, wind power, can only mean that crony capitalism was heavily involved in the political decision making process.

It's also worth noting that rare earth mining and processing, in support of wind turbines and electric car production, has caused terrible pollution in some parts of China.

Rare-earth mining in China comes at a heavy cost for local villages. Pollution is poisoning the farms and villages of the region that processes the precious minerals

Simple.

We all move into the Houses of Parliament and number 10.
Our taxes are paying for it. So we've already paid for the rent, the heating, the water, the electric, the free bar.

In all honesty though - I'm thinking of capping my gas. I live up north and it can drop down to minus 12 in the winter, I just cannot afford it. It's a very bleak world right now.

Where do people want the government to find the money? The public sector is already facing another pay freeze (our friends in the private sector earn considerably more for less responsibility) and they have already raised tax. If we start cutting the green levies as someone suggested where is the investment in a green future for our kids coming from?

Sadly people have over stretch themselves sometime through no fault of their own but we can't expect the government to stop every bad economic crisis happening to us.

Hi Boris 👋

"...we are being disproportionately affected by governments poor decisions."

Hear, Hear! 👏

If the price cap is based on the total amount paid by an average user, then does that mean that if we all make a big effort to use less in the hope of having lower bills, the capped unit costs could actually rise as a consequence?

I honestly think that, however much we reduce our usage, we'll see no difference in what we end up paying. I'm not convinced that they start from the value of a single unit and go from there - I really think that they know how much profit they want to make, divide it by the number of consumers and then base the nominal price per unit on that.

If we all cut our usage in half tomorrow, they'd just increase standing charges even more - and quite probably the unit cost too, likely giving the excuse that they need a certain amount in to maintain the whole infrastructure and supply chain - and blaming us for trying to deprive them of their necessary income by using less!

Say a private company runs buses and has a certain required income for each bus per day, and then half of their regular users stop using it for whatever reason, do we really think they'd keep the prices the same and sustain a 'loss' (whether that 'loss' means not breaking even or not making what they consider an acceptably high level of profit)? Of course they would double the prices for those still using it, and then double them again if that forced another 50% of people to stop using it, until the remaining people who have absolutely no choice but to keep using them end up paying buttock-clenchingly outrageous prices. Yes, they can make some economies, such as gradually replacing their buses with smaller buses - but they still need a driver for each one and maintenance and admin staff costs would stay relatively static.

Remember when we used to have horribly inefficient kitchen appliances, light bulbs, boilers, cars etc. - compared with the ones we have today? We were urged to upgrade each time new technology was released, and told of the fortunes we would save. Didn't really happen, did it? The energy companies never intended to make less money from us at all; they just wanted us to use less and less of their product whilst paying them an ever higher total amount for it.