Saturday, February 24, 2024
It's 2 years today since...
a) all Covid-related legal restrictions were withdrawn
b) Russian invaded Ukraine
The blissful period between these two events lasted approximately three hours.
You likely slept through all of them.
It's also two years since the start of the energy shock that hoicked our gas and electricity bills to unheard-of levels. On the day of the invasion the annual energy cap was £1277. One year later it was £4279, a three-and-a-bit-fold increase. Thankfully it's now down to £1928 and due to fall to £1690 in April, but that's still a 32% increase on two years ago which is still pretty terrible.
Here's a graph of the price cap taken from an excellent research briefing just released by the House of Commons Library - Gas and electricity prices during the ‘energy crisis’ and beyond.
It shows how high bills would have risen in 2022/2023 had the government not introduced the Energy Price Guarantee (minutes before the Queen's ill-health toppled the country into mourning). From October 2022 to June 2023 nobody paid the price cap because the EPG was lower. In July 2023 the EPG became redundant because the price cap fell back.
I wondered how much the energy shock had affected our bills so I've done some rough calculations to work out how much the average household would have paid year on year since 2020. Figures relate to the quarterly price cap where it applies and to the EPG ceiling inbetween. The 2024 figure is a prediction.
2020: £1136
2021: £1149 (1% more than 2020)
2022: £1930 (70% more than 2020)
2023: £2227 (96% more than 2020)
2024: £1650 (45% more than 2020)
Very roughly then, compared to where we would have been, in 2022 we paid two-thirds more than normal, in 2023 twice as much as normal and this year will spend about 50% more than normal. Energy prices may be coming down but we are still forking out way more than might have been the case. Cheers Putin.
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