The government knows “people are under huge amounts of pressure” with the cost of living energy bills, according to the UK’s energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh.
Speaking on BBC radio 4’s Today programme, she said:
And we are absolutely alongside them. And are trying to do everything that we can. That is why the prime minister on Day One of the job put that cut to VAT on electricity bills which will come into effect this October.
But it is also why we are taking a set of measures to try and help the cost of living - the £2 cap on buses, free school meals that are being rolled out, free breakfast clubs, £8000 savings on child care costs. We are doing a set of things to help people get some breathing space.
If I think about energy in particular , for me it exposes one of the things that we’ve been talking about . One of the problems that we’ve got is that we’re very exposed to global fossil fuel markets that we have no control over , where, if you have a conflict in the middle East it bites families finances, that’s why we are determined to fix that.
That’s why we’re driving towards clean energy in order to make sure we’ve got homegrown clean energy here that can have an impact on bills, but critically we’re also trying to make that we’re drawing reforms across the system to make energy more affordable.
Asked if green levies and Net Zero were costing people more, she said:
Well, absolutely not.
If we think about the last five years, families have felt a pinch of energy at two points. The war in Ukraine and now the war in Middle East.
She added “we are uniquely exposed to those gas markets. And that is why we’ve got to make the drive to have homegrown, clean, renewable energies”.
Under the last government, she said:
we didn’t invest in our energy system, we didn’t invest in the grid and we’re going to have to deal with that so for the grid to operate properly we’ve got to upgrade it.
Energy is “absolutely essential to day-to-day life and so we need to make it more affordable.”
She agreed standing charges are “ a massive bug bear”.
The challenge that we have is that those costs pay for things like upgrading and investing in our infrastructure. And so we’ve got to recover them in some way. Ofgem looking at this, we’re working with them to think about the most effective and the fairest way in which we recover that so that we are protecting consumers.
She would not be drawn on the TUC call for windfall tax on bank to cut bills, saying tax was matter for the chancellor, John Healey.
ShareWhat I would say is we are already taxing the energy system. We’ve got a set a taxes that ensures that where, for example, excess profits are being made in the system. That that is being taxed.
But there is a fundamental issue that we have, which is if we want to fundamentally drive down bills, we’ve got to do the job of getting to clean home-grown energy and we are racing towards that. A hundred billion pounds of investment has been unlocked. That’s enough to power 23 million homes. But also, we have got to do the jobs of making sure that the energy system is fair for consumers and I am committed to running up both those things.
We talk about public control and I think look the way that I would explain it is that we’ve got this strange system at the moment where we’ve got a mixture of things that the government is doing to intervene in the energy market to make it work to regulate the energy market and we also have private actors. I don’t think that together that system is working for consumers. And if you speak to people across the country
So we’ve got to think about look how do we ensure that we are getting different parts of the system to work in a way that is supporting consumers.
We’re looking at every part of the energy system, networks, the wholesale, to ask ourselves the question what can we do to make sure that the energy system is serving and working in the interest of consumers.
