The majority of British households expect to restrict their home heating this winter to try to keep rising costs in check, according to research released as the price cap that dictates most bills rose again.<\/p>\n
The fuel poverty charity National Energy Action said 58% of households told its survey they were likely to trim their energy use, a nine-percentage-point increase from the level in January.<\/p>\n
The proportion of households preparing to ration their heating was even higher among those with chronic health conditions, the poll of 2,443 adults found, rising to 64% for those with asthma and 71% for those with a heart condition.<\/p>\n
The cap on how much suppliers can charge for each unit of gas and electricity \u2013 set by the energy regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem \u2013 rose by 2%<\/a> from Wednesday to the equivalent of \u00a31,755 for a typical annual dual-fuel bill.<\/p>\n The increase for the October to December period comes despite a 2% fall in the wholesale price in energy markets over the past three months, because money is needed to cover the rising cost of the government\u2019s energy policies.<\/p>\n Experts at the consultancy Cornwall Insight forecast a slight fall in the cap in January, before the cost of supporting new power networks, nuclear projects and other policy costs adds an extra \u00a3100 a year to the price cap from April.<\/p>\n Ofgem last week released figures showing the UK\u2019s energy debts have climbed to a new high of \u00a34.4bn and there are a record number of accounts in arrears with no plan to back the unpaid bills.<\/p>\n The regulator is preparing to launch a debt relief scheme alongside the government\u2019s landmark \u00a313.2bn warm homes plan<\/a> to fix draughty homes and install heat pumps and solar panels.<\/p>\n Adam Scorer, the chief executive of National Energy Action, said: \u201cUnaffordable energy bills present a risk to health \u2013 and life \u2013 this winter.<\/p>\n \u201cOfgem\u2019s plans to help people out of debt are welcome but need to go much further. Energy bills<\/a> are rising, debt levels are rising, fears for the coming winter are rising. The warm homes plan needs to provide this certainty for the long term.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Business Today<\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Martin McCluskey, the minister for energy consumers, said the government was taking \u201curgent action to support vulnerable families this winter\u201d by expanding the warm home discount to offer \u00a3150 off energy bills to more than 6 million families.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the coming weeks, we will be announcing details of the biggest home upgrade programme in British history to improve up to 5m homes, making them cheaper and cleaner to run,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The majority of British households expect to restrict their home heating this winter to try to keep rising…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-172219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}