More than 2m households in England fell into fuel poverty last year, raising pressure on Jeremy Hunt to ditch a planned cut to energy bills support.
The number of households in England who spend more than 10% of their income, excluding housing costs, on energy has increased from 4.93m households in 2021 to 7.39m in 2022.
The number of households who have low incomes and live in homes with an energy efficiency rating of band D or below also increased by 100,000, to 3.3m in 2022, figures from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s annual fuel poverty report showed. That figure is expected to increase again to 3.5m this year, official figures showed.
A surge in wholesale energy prices linked to the war in Ukraine has pushed up gas and electricity bills, amid a wider squeeze on household costs.
The report underlined the case for MPs and campaigners calling for the chancellor to extend the energy price guarantee, a government policy which aims to limit household bills to £2,500.
Hunt, who is due to deliver the budget on 15 March, plans to make the guarantee less generous from April, raising it to £3,000. On Monday, the regulator Ofgem announced a reduction in the quarterly price cap to £3,280 from April – down from £4,279. However, the increase in the guarantee leaves households facing a sharp rise in costs.
Responding to the fuel poverty figures, the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, said: “These stark figures show millions of families and pensioners are struggling to afford sky-high energy bills.
“It beggars belief that the Conservatives are planning to worsen this cost of living catastrophe by hiking people’s energy bills by another £500 in April.”
Simon Francis, coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said: “Today’s data proves that households across England suffered in cold damp homes this winter because the country has failed to fix the roof when the sun was shining and help those most at risk from the energy bills crisis due to poorly insulated homes.
“Now is not the time to increase energy bills as the government plans to do from 1 April.”
National Energy Action’s chief executive, Adam Scorer, said the fuel poverty figures did not reflect the worst of the energy crisis, with “people being forced to self-disconnect, struggling with ice on the inside of their windows and living with damp and cold”.
In parliament, the shadow climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, said the bills rise was a “political choice”. “[The government] put the balance of fossil fuel companies ahead of the family budgets of the British people.”
Consumer champion Martin Lewis and 85 charities, have called on Hunt to postpone the guarantee’s rise to £3,000. Lewis said he was hopeful that the government would heed the call. “Reading the runes, and I’m careful with my phrasing here, I think we may get a win here. I think there’s a better than 50/50 chance of it not going up,” he said.
The energy secretary, Grant Shapps, has said he was “very sympathetic” to suggestions that the government should ditch the planned rise.
Asked about Shapps’ comments, the prime minister’s official spokesperson said: “All I would say on this is it’s something we are just keeping under review … I don’t think there’s a specific time we are working to.”
The data also showed that the government was making little progress in meeting its goal to improve as many fuel-poor homes in England as is “reasonably practicable” to a minimum energy efficiency rating of C by the end of 2030. Greenpeace has threatened to take legal action against the government over the issue.
Separately on Tuesday, Shapps said it would be “crazy” to risk the country’s energy security by allowing two coal-fired power plants to close. The government had put the units at Drax in North Yorkshire and EDF’s West Burton A plant in Nottinghamshire on standby over this winter.
Asked if he was content for the plants to close, Shapps told the Times: “No, I would absolutely want to make sure that we have the resilience there in case we need it, and I’ve already sent instructions to make sure that that would be the case. We’re not going to leave this to chance.”
