You can still be charged £273 a year even if you use no energy at all, this is the standing charge ( payment made which allows you to be connected to the network) this is what’s going up, so even if you turned off your gas and electric at the meters, you would have to pay this, no, we will all have to pay for liz,s plan but over many years with high bills, much better to tax profits made by the energy companies to pay for the higher prices, when the profits fall, so does the tax, so it’s not forever
@Dextrous63 ,A hornby train set!!
We used to go to the rich boys house to play with his,( invitation only)!!
The kitchen light was connected via a flexible fabric covered wire which
shared a plug into the the single socket outlet in the lounge/dining room!!However,enough of this! It seems to be turning into another
“I was poorer than you debate”.
@Primus1 , Yeah,you are right, what l dont understand about this though,
is why this should increase when the energy price goes up ??
Seems as if everything in the energy market is linked??
Why should this be so ??
Agree @Donkeyman. It has a whiff of opportunism about it. Bit like when you sell a house, a load of people/extra expenses come out of the woodwork at the slightest sniff of money floating around.
I wondered why Standing Charges have gone up so much too - apparently it reflects that the fixed costs of supplying energy have increased a lot plus Ofgem have added the costs of green levies, warm home discounts and the high cost of all the recent energy suppliers going bust to the fixed costs instead of absorbing them or adding them to the unit rates.
So, the Government sold off gas and electricity to the private sector, didn’t regulate it well enough because they don’t want the state to interfere with free markets - so when energy prices soared and a load of small private companies have gone bust, the cost of those failures have been loaded on to the fixed costs that every householder has to pay ???
We must be paying several times over, through various mechanisms, for our energy usage:
How standing charges work
Standing charges are a fixed daily rate that you pay for having an electricity and/or gas connection to cover the cost of supplying energy. Under the energy price cap, Ofgem is using standing charges to recover the costs of the huge number of energy firms that went bust last year – a total of £1 billion this year.
About £68 of the typical £1,971 a year bill under the current price cap is for supplier failures, while other costs, such as increases in fixed network costs (the cost of maintaining energy networks) and policy costs (such as green levies and the rise in the warm home discount rebate) also contributed to higher standing charges.
Currently, electricity standing charges are 45.34p per day for electricity and 27.22p per day for gas.
One of the key features of our species which has made us so “successful” (let’s not derail matters too far by examining the meaning of that word) is the ability to ponder over “what would happen if” and also develop possible ways to deal with/respond to the related answer.
Seems that there are some among our species who have lost that ability.
I may be wrong but as I understand it is when the government “borrow” money it is not the same as we borrow money. The government are borrowing from themselves if that makes any sense and the interest rates are also a lot lower. I don’t fully understand it all so don’t have a go if I am wrong
The government chooses to “borrow” when it spends more than it gets in income.
Most of its income comes from taxes - for example, income tax from your pay cheque or the VAT you pay on certain goods.
It could, in theory, cover all of its spending from taxes - and in some years that has happened.
But governments have not always been willing to increase taxes enough to cover their spending. This is partly for political reasons - it would be unpopular with voters.
There are also other reasons for not raising taxes. If higher taxes leave people with less money to spend, it can be bad for economic growth and jobs.
How does the government borrow money?
The government borrows money by selling bonds.
A bond is a promise to make payments to whoever holds it on certain dates. There is a large payment on the final date - in effect, the repayment.
Interest is also paid to whoever owns the bond in the meantime. So it’s basically an interest-paying “IOU”.
The buyers of these bonds, or “gilts”, are mainly financial institutions, like pension funds, investment funds, banks and insurance companies.
Private savers also buy some.
Some also end up being bought by the Bank of England as part of its current attempts to boost spending and investment in the economy.
Under this policy - known as “quantitative easing” - the Bank has so far bought £875bn of government bonds and £20bn of UK corporate bonds.
@Omah , Thanks for that Omah, thats made things much clearer
What l get from this is that it is just a big hire purchase scheme ?
Which means that some one somewhere must have some money stashed
away initially in order to finance the product being hired ?
Who is/are that/those person/ persons ??
So instead of getting the money stolen from us by oil companies back from them, she wants them to keep it - and we pay them it via taxes over time instead of all at once
I think Ian Duncan Smith indicated their reasoning by saying that a lot of these fuel and energy companies are global and that if we tried taxing them, they’d simply move their money to different countries somehow. He exemplified it by saying that the 5 billion or so windfall tax levied a few months ago will most likely only yield 1 billion for this reason.