to think it’s not just the most vulnerable households that will need help with soaring energy bills?

[Itsokay2020]

Just that really, I appreciate that all households will receive £400 from October (and we’ll be saving this money!) but we are a working household, with a mortgage but little other personal debt. We earn decent salaries, or at least they were, but if our energy bills increase from £130 to £350 plus, we will find things tight. We are not expecting any significant salary increases in the next 12 months.

We haven’t had a family holiday abroad for several years, our cars are 9 years old, we rarely had takeaways and have stopped them altogether now. We’ve performed a financial review of our household expenditure, we can cut back if necessary (gym/tv subscriptions) but even so it doesn’t leave a huge amount of room for manoeuvre. I would prefer to get a second job than stop pension contributions, and have started to look more seriously at this.

We’re questioning whether to sell up, and could potentially have enough equity to be mortgage free, but leaving family, friends and jobs we love stops us in our tracks.

So, AIBU to feel that many households will need help, not just those deemed vulnerable?

Reduce Government spending or find ways of increasing Government income.

Who is bringing in a lot of money that is not being fairly taxed?

I totally agree with you. The squeezed middle are always fucked over because they don't claim benefits but don't have spare cash to cushion crazy rises and can't afford estate planners and financial advisors like wealthy people can. The new PM will have to seriously take this into account because, as others have said, if the middle income people stop buying anything other than the essentials so they can pay their gas and elec bill that has gone up by 6 it 7 times, there will be a huge knock on effect to a lot of small businesses.

£400 isn't going to cut it is it? They need to do something drastic and structural, like France have, and force the energy companies to reduce profits an dpass the savings onto to ALL customers, instead of just trying to punish people that were doing ok.

Retired single people, on a fixed state pension living in rented HMO, where they pay a landlord's sub meter. Not direct to the energy company. So they cannot claim winter fuel payments, nor can they get the £400 cash back etc.
That's who this hurts most.

My dh was a 40% tax payer.
We are now both in mimimum wage jobs .
No stress after work, downsised.
Eat frugally.
15 year old car.
We are the same financially as we were when we were rhe squeezed middle with 2 at uni.
It was v stressful to be in demanding jobs .
We actually feel financially better off than when my dh was on 55k .seroiusly.
Hardly any tax at all. We keep more of our money. ( about which i do feel a bit guilty , but we had been middle incometax payers for 30 plus years , contributed a lot ) . What i am saying is its much better than being in the middle for us and just not worth it anymore .

£400 isn't going to cut it is it? They need to do something drastic and structural, like France have, and force the energy companies to reduce profits an dpass the savings onto to ALL customers, instead of just trying to punish people that were doing ok.

I presume you're referring to the large oil and gas companies such as Shell and BP? In turn, who sell oil and gas to 100 odd countries. Wholesale oil and gas prices are a function of global supply and demand.

So how does this reduction of profits work? You make BP and Shell reduce their prices to all of their international customers? And all of the other oil and gas producing companies and countries? I'm not sure OPEC will be agreeing to that any time soon.

The energy retailers are not making bumper profits, in fact over 30 have gone out of business. They're passing on the increase in wholesale energy costs they're having to pay.

The government could extend its debt further by giving grants etc but it's got to be paid for. High energy prices are a global issue which limits the action available to the government.

They also don't want to be sufficiently punitive that some of our big FTSE100 energy companies decide to move their headquarters outside of the U.K. Shell recently moved its HQ to the U.K. from The Hague citing dividend tax in the Netherlands as one of the reasons.

No idea as I'm not an economist or the Chancellor of the Exchequer but if the Tories want to win the next general election they better come up with something more than £400 into the energy accounts of middle income working people. Of course other governments with more foresight like France kept some control over EDF so now have more bargaining power. We sold everything for private industry and profit so now we're in this mess.

If you're not a middle income, middle earner who is over any benefits threshold I don't think you can appreciate how scared many people in this category are about a monthly bill going up by 6 or 7 times. Middle earners who normally paid £90/100 per month do not have the financial cushioning to suddenly start paying £500/600 per month. If they have to try, all the trickle down to dog walkers, children's entertainers, holiday firms, car washes, restaurants, NT days out, cafes etc etc will stop.

This doesn't mean there will be some people even worse off, I know, the single retiree example for example, but the middle income lot are a massive chunk off the voting electorate and that demographic must contain many more people and voting households. And most of these people live month to month on salary with credit cards taking up the slack for holidays etc. There is no slack for these bills.

The thing about "the middle" getting squeezed hardest is nothing new, but it's hard to imagine help with energy costs will be extended to them

Quite apart from anything else, who would pay for all this?

Listening to economists all a bit dour

Too much public money pumped out to people and interest rates go up to keep inflation down, unemployment goes up too

It’s complex but targeting lower groups means interest rates hit middle and higher more

I think you're missing the point. They can't pay for it all themselves. The figures won't stack up. Even people that earn a reasonable salary can't magic money up out of nowhere. And you can't drastically reduce people's budgets overnight in October and expect them to have that money handy. They won't. Because they'll still be paying their other bills, doing their weekly shops and then dipping into OD for a few days at the end of the month. Likes 1000s and 1000s of households that can't claim assistance over the £400 routinely do already before one bill suddenly quadruples, and more.

Clearly someone has to pay for any assistance/mitigation, like tax payers currently pay for the people getting the extra help through the benefits system (CT rebate and extra payment), but as this clearly will only make matters worse then whoever the next government is will have to come up with some sort of more creative solution won't they? Or the energy companies will just have 1000s of accounts in arrears, all on monthly small pay back schemes, for the foreseeable future and this will end up hurting their profits anyway.

I'm surprised they aren't coming to some sort of agreement with the energy companies themselves and offering future perks, tax breaks etc. Maybe they are in the background (LOL).

They need to tax the corporations properly. It's not right that Shell paid no tax the last three years

So how does this reduction of profits work? You make BP and Shell reduce their prices to all of their international customers? And all of the other oil and gas producing companies and countries? I'm not sure OPEC will be agreeing to that any time soon

as it’s a global problem it needs to be a global solution really. There’s nothing in it for the likes of BP and Shell if their products simply become completely unaffordable. On a societal level we’ll suffer but there is also the loss of custom and their bottom line.

Energy prices are also predicted to go down. If there could be international agreements for the increase in wholesale prices to be shouldered by the corporations currently on the understanding a fixed price would be adhered to when they go down to cover their losses that might make an impact? National loans of sorts backed up by governments?

Its certainly in their interests to protect the ability of their customers to pay them money now and in the future.

I actually think there is much more the government can do to boost the coffers, so to speak, one of those would be a tourist tax. In addition to this, I don’t think non-UK residents should be able to access London museums and galleries for free. It’s a small step in the right direction, and would help local councils reinvest money in vital infrastructure and services.

The UC system needs to be looked at - if I was a single mum, I would have more disposable income each month (albeit living in a rented property) and I just don’t see how this can be right, and it contributes to the housing crisis.

A lot of really valid points have been made, and I too have thought about what happens when the squeezed middle stop spending money in various places - unemployment will rise exponentially and the downward turn will continue. Criminality will increase and social unrest is very likely (I’m surprised we’ve not had riots in our cities already).

After years of austerity, I wish there could be an end in sight; if I had to live on dust for two years, I’d do it if meant a better quality of life, and financial freedom at the end.

The issue with various things like taxing tourists is it impacts behaviour

Same with other taxes. Interestingly the Treasury uses a static modem rather than dynamic which seems counterintuitive as it doesn’t account for change

Maybe another department factors it in

The UC system needs to be looked at - if I was a single mum, I would have more disposable income each month (albeit living in a rented property)

LMAO

I'm in the middle but not particularly squeezed, and we can afford the price increases by belt tightening elsewhere so are fortunate. Like many others, what worries me is that my belt tightening is someone else's job.

The UC system needs to be looked at - if I was a single mum, I would have more disposable income each month (albeit living in a rented property)

And? Where in the rule.book does it say single mums.muat be worse off than everyone else?

Well to be quite honest we're going to be a bit screwed.
We earn pretty well but we live in the south east, have four kids, and a very big mortgage. (Which we need to house our four kids-rent for the same would be beyond us). On top of which our house just burned down-we have been forced to move to the only rental house that we could get which is miles from anywhere-our fuel costs have therefore also doubled. (Which the insurance won't reimburse). We won't not eat so I know our position is better than lots of people-but we won't be putting the heating on until we desperately need to. I feel very bloody bleak and very angry today.

I'm so sorry 😭
Was it due to the heatwave?

Her comment is Daily Mail bullshit anyway

@Ithinkthatisenoughnowthanks at no point did I say they shouldn’t!

@GreenLunchBox eh? What has the DM have to do with this? There are benefits calculators that helpfully provide the information, it’s not hard to check it from there

I saw in the paper yesterday that someone was arguing that high earners shouldn’t get the £400 energy payment to Save money. In theory, I most definitely agree with this. However, what would they define as a high earner and would the admin of deciding who is a high earner cancel out any benefit and land us all with higher bills anyway? It just gets worse and worse. I maintain that furlough was a shit idea given that there were a million plus available jobs that people could have been doing. Why weren’t they doing them? Maybe someone on here could answer that.

Furlough was a necessary part of lockdown and lockdown could not have happened without it. If lockdown is your chosen pandemic management tool, and I accept you haven't said whether it was or not, then that innately involves paying people to stay at home and behaving themselves. It would never have been possible for the state to prevent millions of people from earning a living without providing substantial financial support to them. That's how you get riots. There were 9 million furloughed at one point, and nothing like enough job vacancies for all of them. It's completely unrealistic to think all go and work in care homes/supermarkets could ever have been a solution.

That said, I don't want the £400 either. I don't trust the energy companies and resent being forced into a debt with them.

That said, I don't want the £400 either. I don't trust the energy companies and resent being forced into a debt with them.

When they changed it from £200 to £400, they also changed it to a non-repayable discount.

Oh did they? Well that's something I suppose.

I live alone and it's so hard because even though I have a professional job, it's in a sector that's not highly paid and with only one salary coming into my household even two people on a low salary could easily exceed it. I'm not eligible for any benefits because I have a moderate amount of savings but if bills keep going up at this rate, I can't keep dipping into savings just to pay my bills. Otherwise I'll have no security when the roof needs replacing or something else like that happens. I already do everything I can to limit energy consumption but with the standing charge going up, it's out of my control.

Ideally they need to address the issue at source, how can it be fair ordinary consumers keep paying more and more so the producers get huge profits and benefit from the world situation being what it is.