Brace For July

Ofgem will announce the next price cap on 27 May. Forecasters Cornwall Insight and others now expect a rise of around 12%, taking a typical dual-fuel direct-debit bill from £1,641 to roughly £1,866 a year. That's a £225 increase in three months.

If you remember the last election, you'll remember Labour's promise: bills would fall by £300 a year. The opposite has happened. Bills fell briefly in April due to a temporary easing in wholesale gas prices. They are now expected to rise sharply.

And here's the bit nobody in government wants to say out loud: this isn't just a market story.

Net Zero Has A Price Tag, And You're Paying It

Roughly a quarter of the typical household's bill is now policy and network costs — levies that fund renewables subsidies, capacity payments, and the standing-charge build-out of the grid for net zero. Some of that has been moved off bills and onto general taxation, which is just shifting the same charge to a different pocket.

The cheapest unit of energy is the one you don't have to subsidise twice. Britain has decommissioned dispatchable gas, banned new North Sea licenses, and bet the grid on imported LNG and Continental interconnectors at exactly the moment the Middle East reminded us how volatile that market is.

Energy Debt Is At A Record

Ofgem itself reports household energy debt has now reached £4.5 billion — the highest ever recorded. Suppliers are writing off arrears. Pensioners are rationing heating in May. The country is being asked to pay decarbonisation premiums during a cost-of-living crisis the government insists it has solved.

Industrial users are paying among the highest electricity prices in the developed world. The reason factories close in Britain isn't ideology. It's the price per kilowatt hour.

What Reform UK Would Do

Scrap the Department for Net Zero. Restart North Sea licensing immediately. Cancel the carbon levies on industrial users that have made British steel, ceramics, and chemicals uncompetitive. Treat nuclear as the cheap, reliable, low-carbon baseload it actually is rather than building two stations a generation.

And, critically: tell the truth on bills. You cannot cut energy costs while subsidising the most expensive way to generate energy. Reform's energy policy starts with that honesty. Labour's begins with a press release and ends with a bill rise.

July is going to hurt. The next government will decide whether the July after that does too.