Ofgem confirms the July–September 2026 energy price cap by 27 May. The cap currently sits at £1,641 a year for a typical household — down £117 on the previous quarter, an outcome that ministers will inevitably claim as evidence that "Labour is cutting your bills."
It will not be evidence of anything of the kind. The cap is a quarterly snapshot of wholesale gas prices. It is not policy. It is weather. And what the weather giveth in spring, it tends to take away in winter.
The Hidden Tax in Every Bill
Strip out wholesale gas from your bill and look at what is left. Standing charges. Network costs. "Policy costs" — the catch-all heading that includes the green levies funding the renewable obligation, contracts-for-difference subsidies, the warm-home discount and various efficiency schemes.
Those policy costs alone now add roughly £170 a year to a typical household bill. They are not in the news. They are not in Ed Miliband's press releases. But they are on every electricity meter in the country, every quarter, regardless of what wholesale prices do.
Worse, the charges that used to sit on bills are increasingly being shifted onto general taxation, where they are even harder to track. The green-energy bill is not getting smaller. It is just getting better at hiding.
The Comparative Picture Is Embarrassing
UK industrial electricity prices are among the highest in the G7 — comfortably above France, Germany, the United States and Japan. Domestic prices are about 35% higher than they were before Labour took office in 2024, despite repeated Labour promises that "clean power" would cut household bills by £300.
Ed Miliband's own department — DESNZ, which Reform UK has rightly called the "Net Zero Dustbin" — is responsible for both the rhetoric and the cost. You cannot promise cheaper bills while simultaneously closing reliable baseload, banning new oil-and-gas licences, and subsidising offshore wind contracts that are already exceeding the strike prices the public was told would be impossible.
What This Costs Real Households
I knock on doors every week in Preston East. The story I hear is consistent. Working families on tight budgets describe prepayment-meter top-ups they can't keep up with. Pensioners describe choosing between heating one room or eating one hot meal. Small businesses describe energy bills two and three times their pre-2022 levels — bills that will eventually appear on the price tag of every loaf of bread, every pint, every haircut.
This is not abstract. This is the lived cost of a policy framework that prioritises a 2050 target over the people who are supposed to be alive to enjoy it.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would scrap the legally binding 2050 net-zero target and replace it with a serious, technology-neutral energy strategy. We would issue new oil-and-gas licences in the North Sea. We would back a serious civil nuclear programme — small modular reactors, large-scale where it makes sense, with planning rules that don't take a decade to clear. We would lift green levies off domestic bills altogether and fund any genuine support schemes from general taxation, where they can at least be debated honestly.
The next price cap announcement will arrive on 27 May. Whatever the headline number, the underlying truth will not change. Britain has chosen — through a series of decisions taken without ever putting them clearly to the public — to make energy artificially expensive. Reform UK is the only party telling you that, in plain English. The rest will tell you the weather is good and call it leadership.