Hidden inside this month's inflation figures was a number that should have made the front pages. Domestic heating oil prices in the UK have risen by 95.3% in a year. Not 9.5%. Ninety-five point three. The cost of keeping the lights on, the boiler running and the kitchen warm has nearly doubled for the families who depend on heating oil — and they are overwhelmingly the families who live in rural Britain.
If your home is heated by oil rather than mains gas, you are most likely living in Cornwall, Devon, mid-Wales, the Scottish Highlands, parts of Northern Ireland, or one of the off-grid villages of Lancashire, Cumbria, Yorkshire and the Welsh borders. You are also, almost certainly, not represented by a Labour MP. Which goes some way to explaining why this enormous price shock has been met with total silence from the government.
The Iran War Tells Half the Story
Yes, part of this is the war in the Middle East. The disruption to global oil markets has fed through into kerosene and gas oil prices, which is what domestic heating oil mostly is. But the energy security dimension of this is exactly the thing Labour was warned about and chose to ignore. When you make the country more dependent on imported energy, every shock abroad becomes a bill at home. When you close domestic capacity in the name of net zero, you remove your own buffer.
This is not abstract. The North Sea has gone from being a strategic asset to being run down by deliberate political choice. New licences have been refused. The windfall tax — extended again — has driven away the long-term capital that the basin needs to keep producing. Production at home is falling, imports are rising, and the price exposure is going up. None of that is Tehran's fault.
Net Zero Without a Plan
The government's answer to off-grid heating is heat pumps. They have been the answer for years. The Clean Heat Market Mechanism, raising the manufacturers' obligation to 8% of relevant boiler sales from April, is supposed to nudge the market across. The problem is that air source heat pumps cost £8,000 to £15,000 to install, work poorly in older, less insulated rural properties, and require electricity supply that off-grid villages often do not have at the right capacity.
For the average rural household sitting on an oil tank, the policy is: keep paying the doubled bill until you can afford a heat pump that you cannot afford. This is not an energy policy. It is a hope that everyone will eventually leave the countryside, sell up to a London buyer, and the problem will solve itself.
What Westminster Does Not See
I represent Preston East, in Lancashire. I have constituents in villages outside the city who are quite literally sitting in their coats this winter because they could not justify filling the tank at the new prices. Pensioners, in particular, have been hit hard. The state pension goes up — slightly — and the heating bill doubles. The arithmetic does not add up. Some of these households have been told by their suppliers to expect another 20-30% increase in the autumn if the Middle East situation does not stabilise. That is not a cost-of-living squeeze. That is a slow motion crisis that nobody in central government is treating seriously.
The contrast with how this same political class behaved over the urban gas price shock of 2022 is stark. Then we had emergency Cabinet meetings, an Energy Price Guarantee, hundreds of pounds in direct payments to households. Now we have a 95% rise in heating oil and the Energy Secretary giving speeches about offshore wind capacity. The two-tier nature of this government is not just a political slogan. It is how rural Britain experiences policy in 2026.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would treat off-grid Britain as a national priority, not an afterthought. We would cut the duty on domestic heating oil immediately to take some of the heat out of the price spike. We would create a targeted hardship payment for pensioners on heating oil, modelled on the urban Cold Weather Payment. We would back North Sea production to reduce import dependence and stabilise prices. And we would scrap the parts of net zero that punish rural households without offering them a workable alternative — including the de facto ban on new oil and gas boilers in homes that have nothing else to use.
The British countryside is not a museum to be managed by Whitehall. It is a place where people live, work and pay tax. It is time a government remembered that. The 95% heating oil rise is what happens when one does not. Reform UK is that alternative, and on these issues we will not be silent.