London (AFP) – Pub landlord James Fitzgerald will wait a while longer to switch on the outside Christmas lights at the Thatched House in London, as high energy bills cause financial pain across Britain. Ahead of the UK government’s annual budget on Wednesday set to feature tax rises, the 44-year-old Irishman and millions of Britons are hoping for cost-of-living respite, including from cheaper electricity and gas costs.
“We don’t have our lights on outside yet, because we’ve got to keep our costs down,” Fitzgerald told AFP sat near an open fire heating the pub’s interior. The outside temperature in Hammersmith, west London, sits slightly above freezing. UK energy costs have continued to rise after surging in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago.
“Our gas bill has seriously jumped” over the past year, said Fitzgerald. “We haven’t put the (central) heating on, even though it’s quite cold…We’ve got to, you know, cut back.” He said the pub’s running costs jumped £22,000 ($28,800) in the last year, with about one-fifth of the increase attributed to elevated energy bills. Reports suggest that finance minister Rachel Reeves may introduce budget measures to help ease energy bills, having U-turned this year on plans to cut winter fuel payments to pensioners.
“At the budget I will take direct action to ease the cost of living for all households,” she wrote in The Times newspaper. Fitzgerald cited higher food bills along with hikes to the minimum wage and taxes, including on wine, in the Labour party’s previous budget as other reasons for the “disastrous” increase to outgoings. “Things are only going in one direction, it’s going downhill, and so we really need help from the government to make it viable,” he said.
– ‘Too high’ –
Britain’s energy regulator said on Friday its price cap for households’ gas and electricity usage would inch higher from January. For the average UK household, the cost of gas and electricity would total £1,758 next year, Ofgem said. “Energy prices…across Europe, in particular in the UK, are too high,” the chief executive of Octopus, Britain’s biggest energy supplier, recently told AFP.
CEO Greg Jackson believes changes to UK regulation and infrastructure can ease the burden on households and businesses. “When prices are too high, I don’t think we can look bill payers in the eye, charge them that money, and know that costs could be lower if we were more efficient,” he said. His company’s efforts to limit the impact of soaring price rises saw Octopus at the start of 2025 become Britain’s largest household supplier, surpassing legacy firm British Gas nine years after its launch.
Jackson spoke to AFP from Octopus’ London office, where screens display real-time data showing the amount of energy produced by UK wind farms and customers’ cost savings from using electricity they generate. “We try to find as many ways as we can to help customers save money,” he said, noting they can benefit from roughly half Octopus’ electricity coming from clean energy sources. “When it’s windy or sunny, you’ll often get really cheap electricity available on the wholesale market,” Jackson added. However, while the UK is one of Europe’s biggest producers of renewable energy, it remains dependent on costly gas, which represents more than a third of its energy mix.
– Pub closures –
According to industry data, one UK pub shuts every day. Further tax rises in Wednesday’s budget, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government seeks to cut debt, could see the Thatched House shut its doors at lunchtimes, said Fitzgerald, who has cut staff this year. “Other pubs in the area, they close now on Mondays and Tuesdays,” he noted. “We don’t want to do that, because we are a community pub,” which he explained was an establishment serving mostly local residents, carrying out charity work and hosting parties and wakes.
Customer Keith Patterson has seen firsthand the fallout of high energy prices and other increased costs. “Not many people come in for a lunchtime pint” anymore, said the 65-year-old. “You can see the cost of beer going up on a regular basis.”
© 2024 AFP
