‘The energy price cap won’t help me much’: customers’ fears over winter bills

Consumers explain why modest drop in unit price for gas and electricity does not go far enough

The typical gas and electricity bill will fall to an average of £1,923 a year from October after the energy regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem, announced its price cap on Friday, but consumer groups warn that prices remain “dangerously high” and unaffordable for millions.

Stretched consumers told the Guardian the modest drop in the unit price for gas and electricity would not go far enough to protect them from energy bills they could not afford this winter, in the absence of further help from the government.

The energy costs of Anne, from Cartmel, Cumbria, who is 71 and retired, will certainly not improve much when the lower price cap comes in, as hers is among millions of households whose main energy sources are excluded from it.

She said: “We are off-grid in a barn conversion. We have a wood pellet boiler for central heating and a log burner. The price of wood pellets has increased absolutely ridiculously from £125 per pallet [of pellets] to, at its peak last winter, £800. We recently bought a pallet at the summer ‘bargain’ price of £500.

“The cost of logs has gone up massively as well. We certainly couldn’t afford to heat this place electrically, and the insulation isn’t good enough to put in an air source heat pump, so we’re stuck.”

Last winter, Anne and her partner used the central heating for only two hours each morning and lit a wood burner in the evening. “I made an indoor tent of insulated fabric – the stuff you put inside oven gloves – to reduce the volume of the living space we were heating. We wore a lot of layers,” she said.

To be able to better afford these higher energy costs, Anne and her partner, who is 79, have begun to pick up some work again, and will be housesitting a property in Cornwall in December to lower their energy costs.

“We’ve got ourselves a couple of part-time jobs, cleaning two holiday cottages two mornings a week, which eases matters,” Anne said, “but the whole thing is just distressing. I’m just hoping that the winter will be relatively mild again.”

For Adrian, a teacher and father of two from London, the cap will also do nothing as his family lives in a block of flats with a communal heating network, which are also excluded.

“I would love to have been able to take action to reduce my energy bills but I am unfortunate enough to be part of a heat network with a shared central boiler on a housing estate, managed by the council,” the 41-year-old said.

“The gas used by the central boiler is metered, and the costs are divided between the flats on the estate according to size, regardless of their energy use.

“We have a small, two-bed flat, double-glazed throughout, and we literally switched our heating on maybe four or five times last winter; we just don’t use it because we don’t need it. But the energy bill we’ve been sent for this year was £3,186.

“[The council’s] bill is suggesting that we are going to use 30,000kW of gas, which is, according to Ofgem, what a five- or six-bedroom house would use. These heat networks are completely unregulated, and there is no incentive for the council to be more energ- efficient.”

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Jody, 41, a single mother from Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, works as a cleaner and is the sole earner in her household of four – five when her eldest daughter comes to stay.

“I can’t afford my energy bills,” she said. “There’s no one home during the day, and it’s just the internet, two fridges, and a freezer; everything else is switched off. I used to pay £80 a month for electricity; now I’m using that in two weeks.”

Jody, whose net pay is £1,340, says just her monthly dry cupboard grocery shop and her gas and electricity bills are eating up half her wage.

She added: “Last winter I had to borrow money from family and friends to keep topping up. The government energy rebate of £66 lasted a week and a half each time. I’m not having proper lunches any more and am scared of the next winter.

“The energy cap won’t help me much; the costs are still sky high. Something needs to happen, and fast.”

This article was amended on 25 August 2023 to make clear that wood pellets are sold by the (ton) pallet.