{"id":468218,"date":"2026-03-10T18:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T18:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/468218\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T18:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T18:34:08","slug":"john-odowd-stormont-lacks-financial-fire-power-for-energy-price-relief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/468218\/","title":{"rendered":"John O&#8217;Dowd: Stormont lacks financial &#8216;fire power&#8217; for energy price relief"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">On Monday, the leader of the opposition at Stormont Matthew O&#8217;Toole said his party &#8211; the SDLP &#8211; wanted to urge the executive to &#8220;start planning now to help people&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">O&#8217;Dowd said: &#8220;The SDLP are acutely aware that the Executive does not have the ability to meet the scale of the challenge that is at us.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Meanwhile, the chancellor has said some heating oil companies are using the crisis in the Middle East &#8220;as an opportunity to rip off consumers&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Responding to the huge price increase some heating oil customers have faced, Rachel Reeves confirmed that the government had asked the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) to look into the issue.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;You&#8217;ve got price gouging, and the way to deal with that is ensure that customers are treated fairly and that companies are not ripping off their customers&#8221;, she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Speaking in the Commons, Reeves also addressed petrol retailers, warning that price gouging &#8220;will not be tolerated&#8221; at forecourts.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Last week, the body representing heating oil suppliers in Northern Ireland rejected allegations of profiteering saying that higher prices for consumers reflected rising wholesale prices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Monday, the leader of the opposition at Stormont Matthew O&#8217;Toole said his party &#8211; the SDLP &#8211;&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-468218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468218","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=468218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}