[ad_1]\n<\/p>\n
The Government has issued a response to calls for a fixed national standing charge on energy tariffs.<\/p>\n
Conservative MP Alexander Stafford asked a question in Parliament to energy minister Claire Coutinho as to whether “she will make an assessment of potential merits of introducing a fixed national standing charge for consumers”.<\/p>\n
Treasury minister Amanda Solloway said in response: “Ofgem launched a call for input on standing charges, which closed on Friday 19 January 2024, looking at how it is applied to energy bills and what alternatives could be considered.<\/p>\n
“Ofgem is currently analysing the responses and will publish its response in due course.<\/p>\n
“On 30 March, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State and I wrote to the chief executive of Ofgem, highlighting the importance of keeping standing charges as low as possible.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The update comes after standing charges increased under the rates set out in the new Ofgem price cap, from April 1.<\/p>\n
Average standing charges for electricity increased from 53.35p a day to 60.01p a day while the charge for gas went up from 29.6p per day to 31.43 per day.<\/p>\n
This is despite the overall price cap decreasing as the price cap per unit dropped for electricity and gas, with bills for a typical household dropping from \u00a31,928 a year to \u00a31,690 a year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Martin Lewis has previously condemned the high standing charges as a “moral hazard”, as they previously went up in October despite the overall drop in the price cap.<\/p>\n
He said: “The people who will save most from this change are the ones who use most, the people who save least are the ones who use less.<\/p>\n
“That seems a complete moral hazard to me when we\u2019re trying to talk about getting people to use less energy for the right reasons – not because they can\u2019t afford it – that what we\u2019re doing is effectively rewarding the highest users by the structure of energy bills.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The savings expert said one argument for keeping the standing charges high rather than increasing unit rates is that by hiking unit rates instead, people who use a lot of energy for medical reasons would see their bills shoot up.<\/p>\n
Mr Lewis said this could be fixed if there was a scheme to give payments to low-income households in this situation, but as energy policy is unfortunately not “joined up” in this way, the system remains “fundamentally broken”.<\/p>\n
The financial journalist said: “It is absolutely ridiculous we are putting the standing charge up. It is effectively an energy poll tax that every household has to pay”.<\/p>\n
For the latest personal finance news, follow us on Twitter at @ExpressMoney_.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[ad_1] The Government has issued a response to calls for a fixed national standing charge on energy tariffs. Conservative MP Alexander Stafford asked a question in Parliament to energy minister Claire Coutinho as to whether “she will make an assessment of potential merits of introducing a fixed national standing charge for consumers”. Treasury minister Amanda …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35381,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35380"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}