The official numbers from the Office for National Statistics this month make uncomfortable reading for the Chancellor. Consumer Prices Index inflation rose to 3.3% in the year to March 2026, up from 3.0% the month before. CPIH — the wider measure that includes housing costs — rose to 3.4%. This is the wrong direction. Inflation is supposed to be falling, not rising, on the way to the Bank of England's 2% target. Labour told the country that fixing the economy was the priority. Eighteen months in, the cost of living is still climbing.

The detail is worse than the headline. Food prices are up 3.7%, accelerating from 3.3% the previous month. Transport costs jumped 4.7% — the highest annual rate since December 2022 — driven by motor fuels up 4.9% on the back of the Iran war. Services inflation is running at 4.5%. And in the housing and household services basket, domestic heating oil prices have surged by 95.3%. For families on heating oil — many in rural Lancashire, the West Country, Wales and Scotland — that is a doubling of one of the biggest bills they pay.

Two-Thirds Cutting Back on Essentials

Polling now shows that around 63% of British adults say they have cut back on essentials to handle rising prices. Cut back on essentials. Not luxuries — essentials. Food, heating, school clothes, the small things that mark the difference between living and merely existing. The cost of living crisis was supposed to be a 2022 problem. In 2026, under a Labour government with a thumping majority, we are still living it.

And the policy response from Number 11 is bafflingly thin. The frozen tax thresholds — extended again until 2031 — quietly drag more people into higher tax bands every time wages tick up to keep pace with prices. National Insurance on employers, hiked last year, has worked its way through into the cost of doing business and from there into the prices on the shelf. Energy levies are still climbing. The minimum wage went up in April with no offsetting relief for the small businesses that have to pay it. Every single arm of government policy is pushing prices up. Then the Treasury wonders why prices are going up.

Heating Oil and Rural Britain

The 95% jump in domestic heating oil deserves a paragraph of its own because it tells you something important about who this government is for. Heating oil is what keeps the homes warm in the villages that are off the mains gas grid. That is rural Lancashire. That is Cornwall. That is most of mid-Wales and the Scottish Highlands. The people most exposed to this price shock are precisely the people Labour does not represent in any meaningful sense in Parliament. You will not find an emergency Cabinet meeting about heating oil. You will not find a hardship fund. There is barely a press release.

Compare that to the panicked Treasury response when the cost of urban energy bills rose in 2022. The political class noticed because the political class lives on the gas grid. They are not noticing now because the people paying the bill do not live in their constituencies. That is the reality of a London-centric government dressed up in red.

The Iran War Is Not the Whole Story

Ministers will point to the Iran-related oil shock and shrug. Yes, the Middle East war is part of this. But the broader trend in services inflation, in food, in housing — these are not Tehran's fault. They are the predictable consequence of the National Insurance rise, the minimum wage increase landing on businesses with no pricing power, the planning system that strangles new energy generation, and the relentless tax-and-spend approach to growth that has not delivered growth.

The OECD has cut its UK growth forecast. The IMF has warned about peak taxation. Knight Frank has halved its house price forecast. UK car production has collapsed. Every external observer of the British economy is telling the same story: this country is taxed too heavily, regulated too tightly, and led by a government that does not understand what makes an economy grow.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would raise the personal allowance to £20,000, taking millions of working people out of income tax altogether. We would scrap the National Insurance rise on employers that has fed straight through into prices. We would unfreeze the income tax thresholds and let people keep more of what they earn. On energy, we would cut the levies and the green subsidies loading the bills, end the assumption that net zero must come at any cost, and pursue North Sea production seriously. On heating oil specifically, we would cut the duty for off-grid households until prices stabilise.

None of this is radical. It is what every previous government understood instinctively: when prices are rising, the worst thing you can do is keep raising taxes and adding regulation. Labour is doing exactly that. The result is in the ONS bulletin this morning. Inflation up. Wages squeezed. Two-thirds of the country cutting back on essentials. And nothing in the Chancellor's diary suggests any of it is going to change.

The voters get their say next Thursday.