Brace yourself for the next bill. Ofgem has confirmed the energy price cap will rise by 13% from 1 July, pushing the typical direct-debit household from GBP 1,641 a year to GBP 1,862. Gas alone is going up around 24%. For millions of families already cutting back on the essentials, this is another hammer blow at the worst possible time.
Families Pay While Politicians Posture
We are told this rise is down to higher wholesale gas prices driven by conflict in the Middle East. There is truth in that. But it is only half the story. The other half is a deliberate political choice to make Britain dependent on imported, volatile energy while shutting down our own supply. When you refuse to produce your own gas, you are at the mercy of every flare-up thousands of miles away.
A household earning an ordinary wage does not care about the abstract targets set in Whitehall. They care that the heating costs more than it did last year, and the year before that. That is the reality the political class keeps failing to grasp.
Net Zero Is a Tax on the Poorest
Buried in every energy bill are the policy and network costs of the headlong rush to net zero - subsidies, levies, and grid upgrades all loaded onto the consumer. These costs fall hardest on exactly the people who can least afford them: pensioners, low earners, families in poorly insulated homes. Net zero, as currently designed, is one of the most regressive taxes in Britain - and almost nobody calls it what it is.
There is nothing compassionate about a policy that leaves a pensioner choosing between heating and eating so that politicians can hit a target and pose for a photograph at an international summit.
Britain Sits on Energy It Refuses to Use
This is the maddening part. Britain has abundant gas under the North Sea and beneath our own soil. We have the engineering, the skills, and the geology to be far more self-sufficient. Instead, successive governments have throttled domestic production, blocked new licences, and left us importing energy - often with a bigger carbon footprint - from abroad. It is economically illiterate and environmentally pointless.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would scrap the net zero levies that inflate every bill and put that money back in people's pockets. We would issue new North Sea oil and gas licences to secure our own supply, back new nuclear to deliver cheap, reliable baseload power, and end the subsidy merry-go-round that enriches energy speculators at the bill-payer's expense. Cheap, secure, home-produced energy is not a fantasy. It is a choice this country keeps refusing to make.
Lower bills are not beyond us. They are being deliberately kept out of reach by an establishment more interested in targets than in the people who pay for them.