Energy Costs

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 9th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Hannah Spencer (Gorton and Denton) (Green)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered energy costs.

It is a pleasure to serve with you chairing, Ms McVey, and I am grateful to colleagues who are here today. This is my first speech in Westminster Hall, and we all have a lot to say on this issue, so I will see how I manage with interventions and where we go from there, if that is all right.

Today is exactly 100 days since I first set foot in Parliament, as the MP for Gorton and Denton. Since then, one issue has come up pretty much every single day, whether I am speaking to families in Gorton, support groups in Manchester or local Denton businesses that are desperate to keep their doors open, and that issue is the unaffordable cost of energy.

One in three households in Gorton and Denton is living in fuel poverty, and across England nearly 3 million households are in that position. Behind those statistics are people—people who are finding it harder and harder to pay their bills each month, and families who are having to choose between staying warm and buying new school uniforms for their kids—kids who are playing penguins at bedtime because their parents are trying to make a game out of huddling together against the cold.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

First of all, I commend the hon. Lady: in her short time here, she has made a name for herself as someone who speaks on behalf of her constituents, so well done. Power NI supplies 60% of Northern Ireland homes—a 6.2% increase—and charges £1,093 for credit meters and £1,065 for keypad meters, on top of the £200 price increase last year for every family. That is how much it costs. The squeezing of the middle class is now a vice, so does the hon. Lady agree that the Government must step in now to release that energy vice and lower the costs by any means possible? Her constituents and my constituents want the same thing.

[Hannah Spencer]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments, and I agree that we have to do something to tackle this immediately.

Before I became an MP, I was a plumber. I spent my days going into people’s homes, and on so many occasions I saw the problem right in front of me. I remember walking into someone’s house and the air being so thick with damp that you could almost slice through it. The mum told me it was a constant battle to scrub mould off the walls. This was not an issue of ventilation, as some would try to suggest: it was a working family trying to provide for their kids and being unable to afford the basics—a warm home that is not full of damp; it was a working family handing their hard-earned cash to fossil fuel giants. Fossil fuel giants are never the ones asked to tighten their purse strings. No, it is always us who are expected to adjust our living standards, so that they can keep making excess profits.