Sunak’s energy rebates won’t even come close to helping people with soaring bills
This may destroy them, a cost of living explosion such as few have known in their lifetimes. The £350 of support for most households, announced today by Rishi Sunak, the chancellor amounts to only a fraction of the extra bills heading towards most households. It came on the day that the Bank of England raised interest rates, and on the day Shell boasted of a “momentous” 14-fold rise in its profits to £12bn. Labour’s promise of a windfall on soaring energy company profits never looked more prudent.
Expect people to understand all too well that these easements Sunak offers are nothing more than disguised loans. This “heat now, freeze later” debt will be clawed back from every future energy bill until 2027 – and prices may rise again. Labour’s Chris Bryant spelled out in parliament why £350 doesn’t “touch the sides” of the problem for his constituents in Rhondda: household costs are increasing by £2,875 a year, he said, in a constituency where the average wage is £27,000.
How crafty to shift some of the payment of this temporary relief on to local authorities, through the rebate on council tax bills. Prof Tony Travers, of the London School of Economics, warns that as this is just a one-off, when council tax bills soar next year the blame is likely to fall on hard-pressed local authorities, not on Westminster. “Many councils will try to make more cuts to keep that rise down,” he tells me – but there is no more to cut.
Just before the 2010 election, I first heard a soon-to-be Tory minister tell colleagues with glee they would “devolve the axe” to councils – and so they did, with local authorities bearing the brunt of austerity. In this week’s “levelling up” white paper, with its lyrical evocations of localism in Jericho and a
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