@Getoff
If the government wanted to solve the problem purely by manipulating energy prices, they should actually raise prices, by putting an extra tax on consumption, so prices go up even more than they underlying rates. Then they should use the extra money to pay a flat subsidy to household on Universal Credit. The increased prices would hit the rich, who use more energy, harder, and would force everyone to try even harder to economise, putting some downward pressure on demand and therefore prices. The poor would be helped, and the total amount paid for energy would be marginally lower than it would have been, and government finances would not be impacted.
The only problem with this is idea of yours that it is actually the poor that consume far more energy than the rich. Not just because the poor massively outnumber the rich, but because the poor are living in substandard energy inefficient homes that cost more to heat to a decent temperature. So the poor would pay more in than they’d ever get back with your idea.
Median required fuel costs for the least efficient properties are over 2 times higher than costs for the most efficient properties. These figures are from the 2022 Fuel Poverty factsheet but use 2020 prices. So you will have to mentally multiply them by 4 to get a feel for the median costs coming in October (added in brackets by me)
Median Fuel costs by EPC rating
A-C - £1,061 (£4,244)
D- £1,312 (£5,248)
E- £1,716 (£6,864)
F-G - £2,397 (£9,588)
55% of fuel poor households live in properties with EPC rating of D or below. 25% in properties rated D-E and 30% in properties rated F-G. A lot of this is linked to the private rental sector. Households living in privately rented accommodation are most likely to be fuel poor (25.0%). Despite only 18.7% of all households privately renting their homes, 35.4% of all fuel poor households live in this type of accommodation.
side bar on how the energy crisis is being compunded by a rental shortage crisis: This is largely because a landlord has no incentive to spend thousands of £ making a property energy efficient when all the savings are to the tenants energy bills. The landlord gets zero return from any investment in insulation, heat pumps, solar panels, etc. Which is why new legislation is raising the minimum EPC rating required on private rentals. But instead of forcing landlord to make the property more energy efficient, they are instead getting out of the private rental sector in droves- some are selling up, some are converting to less regulated holiday lets. This in turn has created a rent crisis where rents are increasing dramatically, average rent per month rose by £100 in a single month this year. So tenants are now paying more rent to live in still energy inefficient properties (because the legislation isn’t in force yet so few landlords have actually spent the money to bring properties up to the new standard).