Energy package to help struggling families

Tuesday, 16 September 2008

Late last week Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in conjunction with the energy companies, came up with a package meant to help struggling families and the elderly with their electricity and gas bills.

The package includes:

• 50% cut in the price of insulation for all households
• Pensioners and the poor get free cavity wall and loft insulation
• This year’s bills frozen for half a million poor customers
• Free central heating for the poorest pensioners by partial reversal of cut to warm front programme
• Increase in cold weathr payments from £8.50 to £25 a week for pensioners, unemployed with children under five, and disabled people – in a harsh winter

The government’s aim is to get every home in Britain insulated by 2020. Councils, volunteers and energy companies will visiting homes in deprived areas to get people to join the scheme. Mr Brown said this was a better way than giving cash rebates to consumers which might have been paid for by a windfall tax on energy companies.

The government wants the energy companies to pay for the package at £910m, and Mr Brown has asked them not to pass on the expense to the consumer. However, already David Porter, chief executive of the Association of Electricity Producers, representing the "big six" energy firms, has said that might be unavoidable.

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