Rocketing energy bill will make poor ‘starve or freeze’

Poorest section of people in the UK will be left to “starve or freeze,” as a result of rocketing energy prices, consumer expert Martin Lewis has warned, urging Chancellor Rishi Sunak to take action in his spring statement.

Predicting that energy bills for an average household could hit £3,000 in October, Lewis gave a stark assessment of the potential effects of such a rapid increase, when many families are already struggling, and inflation is running at a 30-year high.

“That’s my conservative guess: not the worst case,” Lewis told The Guardian.

“I think people are going to feel worse than they have for a long time this year. When your energy bill comes in and it’s £3,000 for a year instead of £800, nobody feels good.”

“When you start to have absolute poverty, which is what we’re going to be talking about with this, when you start to have panic, and a nihilistic feeling of the future, when our charity services start to be swamped … then I think you have to get to the point where you have to question what the impact on wider society is, because you know that extreme poverty causes civil unrest,” he said.

“I hope we are not there yet, and I hope we won’t get there,” he added, but called on Sunak to offer, “something that gives people peace of mind that they will survive – and I use that language deliberately”.

Sunak is set to give his spring statement on March 23. 

“We do not need wholesale plans and costs – we need the commitment that something will be done, and the scale of help for the individual,” Lewis said.

He argued that the chancellor’s first priority must be “those people who will simply starve or freeze because of this. And that is not an exaggeration.”.