Energy Costs

I will call Hannah Spencer to move the motion and then I will call the Minister to respond. I remind other Members that they need to have sought permission from the Member in charge if they wish to intervene.

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.

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.

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.

On that point, will the hon. Member give way?

I will continue, if that is okay.

Bills have gone up by 79% since the energy crisis began in 2020. That is an extra £5,000, when our constituents’ hard-earned wages are already stretched to breaking point. Yet, from 1 July our constituents face another increase, of £221, when the next Ofgem price cap comes into effect. That is why, on my second day in Parliament, I helped to get the all-party parliamentary group on fuel poverty back up and running, and why I will join Fuel Poverty Action and other campaigners on 1 July to demand that energy costs are brought down for good.

The scale of this crisis for families is enormous. It also perfectly captures what the Green party means when we talk about rip-off Britain. While my constituents are struggling, fossil fuel giants and privatised energy companies are cashing in, and almost a quarter of energy bills are taken as profit. In the first month after the US and Israel’s initial strikes on Iran, the share value of just five North sea oil and gas companies was boosted by £73 billion—£73 billion in one month. The family owners and chairman of the private oil and gas company Perenco are worth £8 billion and are now among the top 25 richest people in the UK.

All of that has happened in a country where a million children under five live in fuel poverty, and where one in three kids in Greater Manchester lives in poverty. Working hard used to get people a decent life; now it is more likely to line the pockets of billionaires, fossil fuel companies and energy giants.

The Green party is clear that things have to change. First, people in my constituency need support immediately, not in three months’ time. The Chancellor is apparently “monitoring the situation” and will intervene if necessary, but on behalf of families dreading the months ahead, and on behalf of disabled people who have high energy use all year round to run specialist equipment, I am telling the Government that today is the day when it is definitely necessary. Does the Minister agree that the Ofgem energy price cap should be frozen to provide universal support for households now? If not, what are the Government going to do to support bill payers with rising energy costs from July and into the winter? Will they increase the warm home discount, which has not kept pace with rising bills? Shifting some policy costs off bills is positive, as are steps to separate electricity and gas prices, but all electricity levies could be paid for more fairly by progressive taxation. We need to be taxing the wealth of multimillionaires and billionaires more fairly. Providers of frontline support, such as community warm spaces—of which there are a lot in my constituency—need immediate support too. Does the Minister agree that those vital community assets should get lower energy rates?

Will the hon. lady give way?

I am going to continue.

Fourthly and finally, we must go further and faster on renewables. New fossil fuel extraction will not bring down bills or improve the UK’s energy security—a fact I know the Minister agrees with. Since the start of the war in Iran, wind and solar have saved the UK from gas imports worth £1.7 billion. Can the Minister provide assurance that the Government will not approve proposed drilling at Rosebank, Jackdaw or Cambo, or allow new oil and gas extraction through tiebacks to existing production facilities? How will the Department use the upcoming energy independence Bill to accelerate the roll-out of renewable energy and reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels?

I am pleased to have secured this debate on my 100th day as an MP. Last Sunday marked the 100th day of the US-Israeli war against Iran, which, as well as inflicting untold suffering and devastating in the region, has triggered the UK’s second major energy price crisis of the 2020s. I recognise all that the Government are doing to bring that international crisis to an end, and I hope the Minister will use this moment to also try to end the crisis of unaffordable energy costs for my constituents and millions of others across the country.

Will the hon. Lady give way?

I am just about to finish.

If we do not do something, this issue will keep happening. We need to act—not in the interests of fossil fuel giants, but in the interests of the very people who sent us to this place to make their lives more liveable.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) for securing the debate, and I congratulate her on her first Westminster Hall debate and on giving hon. Members across the Chamber the opportunity to discuss a vital issue for all our constituents.

As I draw the debate to a close, I want to be very clear about this Government’s priorities. The increase in the price cap announced by Ofgem two weeks ago is not what any of us wanted, and it is caused by the war in Iran. Two days before the conflict began, the price cap fell by 7%—a reduction that is still built into the prices being paid today. As the Prime Minister has said, this is not our war, but we are now feeling the effects of it. That is why we are very clear that the strait of Hormuz must be reopened to traffic.

Is it not totally outrageous that energy giants will make billions in extra profits from Trump’s war on Iran while ordinary people are hit with higher costs? Does the Minister agree that we should introduce an emergency war profits tax to ensure that they cannot make a single extra penny in super-profits from this crisis? We can use that money to fund urgent cost of living support.

My hon. Friend will know that decisions about tax are for the Chancellor. We already have the windfall tax on energy profits in place—a tax opposed by the SNP and the Conservative Opposition.

I will turn to the points raised by the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton and my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) in a moment. As I was saying, it is not our war, but we are now feeling the effects, and that is why we are very clear that the strait of Hormuz must be reopened to traffic. As Members across the Chamber would expect, we are continuing to monitor the situation. We are exploring all options for future support, but we are taking action now to deal with high prices.

Let us be clear why we are doing that: we know that the pressure of high energy costs is very real for many families across the country, as the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton described. Households continue to feel the burden of bills, particularly where incomes are tight, and there is little room in their budgets for unexpected costs. We are determined to return bills to the downward path they were on before the outbreak of the war. It is important to note that energy prices in 2025 were lower than they were in 2024. We delivered a 7% reduction in energy prices in February. They were on a downward trajectory before the outbreak of war in Iran. We are doing this to tackle fuel poverty and protect people from the rollercoaster of fossil fuel markets that has left too many families exposed to volatile energy prices for too long.

It is good to hear the Government’s intention to reduce energy prices. The hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) is right to call for more affordable energy. In France, electricity is about a third cheaper than it is here, with nuclear at the heart of the system. Does the Minister agree that ruling nuclear out or not progressing it quickly enough is wrong, and will he join me in calling for the assessment of Scotland’s nuclear potential to be published?

I join the hon. Lady in those calls on nuclear energy, which is essential to our energy mix. She highlighted the example of France; one reason why its electricity cost is so low is that it carried on building nuclear through the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Unlike this country, where we had a stop-start approach to nuclear energy, France has been able to keep costs low. It is disappointing that we have seen opposition to nuclear from the SNP, which will not allow it to be built in Scotland, and from the Green party, which has opposed it, including at Wylfa in north Wales, where we are creating a whole generation of new jobs around nuclear. More than 1,900 Scots move from Scotland to England each week to work on nuclear projects—people who could be working far closer to home if there was a new generation of nuclear energy in Scotland.

Turning back to the action the Government have already taken, in the autumn Budget we acted to reduce electricity costs, to the benefit of all households with a domestic electricity meter. We did that by scrapping the energy company obligation and moving 75% of the domestic costs of the renewables obligation to the Exchequer. By doing that, we have been able to provide immediate savings for households.

The average saving was around £117 within the price cap, but because it disproportionately fell on electricity—I know that the hon. Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald) is interested in the cost of electricity, particularly in rural areas—the discount for rural areas and those on electricity was well over £300 within the price cap. As I said earlier, those changes are still factored into energy bills now; without that action, the July price cap would have been significantly higher.

We also announced the continuation of the warm home discount scheme until 2030-31. That will provide around 6 million eligible households with a £150 rebate on energy bills each winter; it is a significant extension of what was available under the previous Government, and it has reached far more people in the last year than it did in the past.

The Minister is making a powerful point about the investments that the Government are making in green and clean energy. In Macclesfield, families are suffering from high energy costs at the pumps or in making sure that their homes are warm when they need to be. Does he agree that tackling climate change, investing in clean energy and bringing down bills come together as a coherent argument, and that we should all be making the case for that?

My hon. Friend is a champion for his constituents. He is making the argument not just for lower prices at the pump and lower costs of energy, but for doing that in a clean, green way. Those two things do go hand in hand; we can reduce energy and fuel prices while people can also make important decisions about clean energy in their own lives. That is exactly what the Government are doing.

As I was saying, the approach that we are taking is supported by our warm homes plan, which represents the biggest public investment in home upgrades in British history. It is backed by £15 billion and will help upgrade up to 5 million homes by 2030; that means real improvements to the homes people live in.

Households will benefit from solar panels, clean heat technologies and batteries, and improved insulation. Insulation is an essential part of what we are trying to do in the warm homes plan; it has always been part of Government schemes and will into the future. All that is to cut bills and improve comfort for homeowners, renters and others. It will mean a housing stock that is better prepared for the future and a country that is less vulnerable to energy price shocks.