For Richer, For Poorer...

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The projected rises in energy bills this coming year will simply be too much for the majority in this country to bear, financially. Fact. A fifty percent increase in domestic fuel costs is simply unsustainable. Outstripping inflation by nearly an order of magnitude will severely unbalance an already frail economy, tipping many over the edge into fuel poverty and debt. As is customary, the hardest hit will be those already close to that edge, with the wealthy able to simply shrug off the changes as an annoyance rather than a life-damaging event.

We've long had a significant proportion of our population locked into debt spirals because of inequality generally: there are families out there often working several poorly paid jobs simply to stay poor, while we laud the rich who bemoan their wealth as inadequate to their needs, and at the same time see no irony in food banks and begging in our wealthiest towns and cities. For those already over the edge, it's difficult to see how they will survive the fuel cost increases: something has to give.

This is one area of inequality that can easily be rectified by paradoxically making that inequality greater. At the moment, standing charges are equal across the board, to within market differences (as we insist on calling fuel supply a 'market' and 'business', we'll roll with it), no matter how large or small one's home happens to be. So, a person living in a tiny, one-bedroom Welsh cottage pays the same base charge as someone in a twenty bedroom mansion in St John's Wood.

Given the disparity in means between the two and the gulf in overall energy usage, surely it would be both fairer and more ecologically sensible to levy a standing charge commensurate with the size of the building. Not its rateable value - that iniquitous system has long been a hefty discount favouring the rich over the poor - but rather a square-footage tax, reflecting the energy needs of the building and tipping the advantage back the other other way for a change. It won't solve the problem, but for once it would tilt the playing field the 'right' way for a change. I think I've been watching too many Robin Hood stories of late...

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