Cost of Living Increases

Angela Crawley Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

As the motion makes clear,

“households will soon be suffering the worst income squeeze since the 1970s”.

The Bank of England has said that inflation could reach more than 7% in April. Households’ average energy bills are forecast to rise by 54%—almost £700 on average—and there is a very real fear that energy costs could rocket again by a comparable amount in October.

Let me put that in context. One in seven people in Scotland are already finding household energy bills unaffordable. That is 640,000 people, and equates to 7 million people across the UK. Whether the cause of these difficulties is simply inflation, the massive hikes in energy costs themselves, low pay or underemployment, the fact that 68% of working-age adults in the UK who are in poverty live in households where at least one adult is in work—the highest figure on record —speaks volumes about the Government’s failure even to understand, let alone take seriously, poverty and what it means in this country. What else could explain their hiking national insurance contributions, removing the universal credit uplift, and allowing energy companies to impose brutal increases on people many of whom were already having to choose between heating and eating? According to the Resolution Foundation, those ill-conceived policies could lead to a fall in real household income of £1,000 per year for working-age households.

Of course, what successive UK Governments have not done simply makes the situation worse. We have all seen—and have just heard about—petrol and diesel approaching £2 per litre, and in some cases it already costs more than that. That is £9 or £10 a gallon, which essentially means that it costs over £100 to fill up an average saloon car tank. That is prohibitively expensive for someone on modest wages who simply wants to fill up the car in order to get to work. Yet every Tory Government I can recall has set their face against a “fuel duty regulator”, which would at least have moderated some of these obscene increases. May I just respond to something that was said by the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray)? Let us remind ourselves that Shell alone made £4.7 billion of profit in the final quarter of 2021, and £14 billion in the entire year. So someone is doing very nicely out of these rising costs.

I now wish to turn to a slightly different energy-related matter. Yesterday I received an email from my constituent Elisabeth Walton. She wrote:

“I am writing to you as, being my representative in the House of Commons, I am hoping you will be able to seek an answer for people like me who have been unable to heat their homes as a result of rising prices. I live in an electric-only home, and chose so in an effort to reduce my reliance on fossil fuels.

While I have done everything in my power to reduce the amount I spend on heating (switching from a prepay meter, insulating windows, draught excluders, blankets and hot water bottles), as a single income household with a disabled partner I simply cannot turn on my storage heaters due to the sheer cost.

Could you please explain to me why, with such investment in renewable energy, that my electric standing charge could have more than doubled despite the only price rises affecting oil and gas...

Why is VAT not being cut? Presumably this is one of the actual benefits Brexit could offer us? What is the government doing besides forcing repayable loans onto us?

Why are energy business profits not being controlled to avoid the exploitation of powerless people?

Is there anything I can do to apply pressure to these companies and ease this hardship?

I have gone to my employer to plead for a raise or increased responsibility to meet this increase in living expenses, particularly as I continue to work from home, but this has been flatly denied.”

This is someone who has already done everything she can, and yet is being hammered with energy price rises.

[Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)]

Many of my constituents have written to me expressing the same concerns. Furthermore, the majority are members of single-parent families, particularly women, who have already borne the brunt of austerity and the worst effects of the changes in universal credit. They will not now benefit from the £20 uplift that the Government have removed from so many families who needed it. Does my right hon. Friend agree that more needs to be done to support those families?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. I remind hon. Members who intervene to face forward so that you are addressing the House and are properly picked up by the microphones.