‘Policy on energy use now!’

• SPIRALLING gas prices and the resultant collapse of several small energy companies will hit many hard, particularly coming at the same time as inflation increasing other household costs and the government threatening to remove its weekly uplift to universal credit.

It also, though, points a clear finger at the absurdity of government relying on retail market competition to try to squeeze prices down a few per cent, by people switching suppliers, rather than implementing the proper UK-wide programme we need, to make significant reductions to their energy use, if we actually want to achieve our carbon reduction targets; because insulating and ventilating everyone’s homes properly will also chop their fuel bills down.

The retail energy market has always been a house of cards, its small new companies bringing in a few “agile” new IT efficiencies but more significantly just relying on special offers to tempt in new customers and trusting to their complacency to stay on when prices go up again, after the initial offer period.

These recent failures, however, also demonstrate the fragility of business models built on short-termism and a precarious attitude to risk, in the hope of quick profits, and which will now have to be bailed out by the rest of us, who are already paying more for higher-priced but more dependable tariffs, if often tied in with clunky old management systems and big shareholder dividend payouts.

It is, of course, a good thing that our prime minister is currently out, in the run-up to November’s COP26 UN climate conference, trying to persuade the rest of the world of the importance of the preventing or mitigating climate change.

But his government needs to get a grip on the issue here at home too. We don’t need quick fixes and a focus on price competition and switching. We need proper investment in a systematic strategy to retrofit the country’s homes.

ANDREW MYER
Islington Green Party