Middle classes face threat of higher bills to pay for net zero
The energy regulator has launched a review of energy bill costs to 'ensure increased fixed costs don't disproportionately affect vulnerable and low-income consumers'.
Ofgem is worried that the massive costs of expanding the UK's transmission system to cope with electrification will drive up standing charges, the fixed network cost that covers the pylons, cables and pipes needed to get power and gas into properties.
These charges account for nearly £300 of the average £1,720 domestic energy bill and have risen sharply since 2019. The decision by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, to decarbonise the grid by 2030 risks pushing them up even more.
Ofgem is worried that a surge in standing charges will disproportionately hit poorer households who can do little to avoid the higher fees.
Jonathan Brearley, Ofgem's chief executive, said: 'As we transition to a renewables-based energy system, electricity unit costs may decrease due to reduced reliance on gas [for power generation]. However, fixed costs – such as those needed to upgrade the energy network – could rise.
'This shift in the make-up of system costs means we need to review how we pay for energy and carefully consider how these costs are distributed.'
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BBC News
5 minutes ago
- BBC News
Car finance payouts limited, but lenders aren't off the hook
There may well be a few sighs of relief from senior finance company and banking executives following the Supreme Court's ruling, but it is unlikely you will hear the champagne corks verdict does almost certainly reduce the potential compensation bill significantly. Lenders no longer face the prospect of having to pay £30bn to £40bn to aggrieved car buyers. The likelihood of the government stepping in also appears to have receded the industry is not off the hook. The Financial Conduct Authority may still open a redress scheme for cases where dealers had a financial incentive from lenders to ramp up interest rates on loans as much as possible. The Supreme Court's ruling also upheld one consumer claim, in which the commission payments were deemed unfair – and that could provide a template for others to follow. All of this means the compensation bill could still be in the Supreme Court's intervention has been eagerly awaited since October, when the Appeal Court issued a verdict in three test cases which could have triggered an avalanche of compensation each case, people who had bought cars on finance claimed they were partially unaware that the deal had involved a commission payment being made by the lender to the car dealer. They claimed that in law the commissions amounted to bribes, or secret Appeal Court judges agreed, essentially saying that commission payments made by a finance company to a dealer for arranging a car loan were illegal if the car buyer had not given his or her "informed consent".They also concluded that a car dealer had a "fiduciary duty" towards the car buyer when it came to arranging a car loan. In other words, the dealer should set his or her own interests aside, and act purely on the customer's meant that millions of car buyers could potentially claim compensation – if they could show that the dealer had not specified what commission payments they were receiving for lining up a finance deal. It was not enough for the details to be buried in small had feared that this would lead to an avalanche of claims against them – and that the same arguments could be used to challenge other kinds of consumer finance agreements as well, potentially increasing the compensation bill still the Supreme Court threw very cold water over those arguments. The President of the Court, Lord Reed, dismissed the idea that car dealers had a "single minded duty of loyalty" to their customers, and insisted they "plainly and properly" had personal interests in the finance agreements they were involved ruling clearly blocks off what could have been a very wide avenue for compensation claims. However, the court did side with one of the claimants. In the case of Marcus Johnson, a factory worker, it decided that the finance agreement was "unfair" under the terms of the Consumer Credit Act. This was because the size of the commission payment was very large, and because Mr Johnson had been misled about the relationship between the dealer and the lender. He was, they said, entitled to say this could open the doors for other cases in which the commission payments are seen to be is also a key question the Supreme Court ruling does not answer. This is what should happen in cases involving so-called Discretionary Commission Agreements (DCAs). These were finance deals in which the car dealer could set the interest rate of a loan, within a set scale. The higher the rate, the more commission they would be paid – and the customer would be unaware of the Financial Conduct Authority banned such deals in 2021. It is now considering whether to launch a redress scheme for consumers who were affected by them. If it goes ahead, millions of car buyers could still have a claim, though it is not clear how much compensation they would to Richard Barnwell, a financial services advisory partner at accountancy firm BDO, the bill could still be substantial."We believe there is still a potential for redress, for example, if discretionary commission arrangements are deemed to be an unfair relationship, redress could still be from to £5bn to £13bn or more," he analysts agree. According to Martin Lewis, who runs the MoneySavingExpert website, "the Supreme Court has certainly narrowed the number of people who will be able to reclaim car finance. I think you're probably talking the lower end of £10bn, as opposed to £40bn."That £10bn would still be a significant figure. But the finance industry appears to have avoided the potential free-for-all rush to claim compensation the earlier verdict had threatened to spark while the Treasury says it will "work with regulators and industry to understand the impact for both firms and consumers", the BBC understands that the likelihood of the government intervening with retrospective legislation to protect financial firms has now diminished law of bribery only applies to persons who owe a single-minded duty of loyalty and are therefore bound to have no personal interest in the matter that they are dealing the present case the car dealers plainly and properly have a personal interest in the dealings between the customers and the finance companies.
The Sun
5 minutes ago
- The Sun
Who asked for population of Greater Manchester to flood UK in just 4 years? Politicians are so out of touch with public
WHAT holds a country together? It's one of the most important questions a nation can ask. Yet, today, were you to quiz anybody in Westminster, they would probably stare back at you with a blank expression, unable to give you a convincing answer. 11 This was not the case in the most ancient civilisations, such as Greece and Rome, of course, where this question was always on the minds of leaders. In Ancient Greece, the writer Pericles warned that leaders will only hold their state together so long as they listen to the people they lead, 'for only then can leaders rule with their trust'. And in Ancient Rome, too, the statesman Cicero reached the same conclusion, warning the leaders of the city state that unless they look after their own people first — which he considered their 'highest duty' — then their civilisation will rapidly crumble from within and become vulnerable to external invaders. Why, you are probably asking yourself, am I rewinding the clock to these ancient thinkers? Because what they understood is what far too many of our politicians in Westminster today fail to understand — that once this sacred bond between the rulers and the ruled breaks, there is no going back. Once leaders become so out of touch, so adrift from the people they claim to represent, then their civilisation will plunge into chaos, carnage and darkness. And is this not what is happening in Britain today? A political class, a ruling class, that increasingly looks utterly adrift from the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding majority? Take another issue some of those ancient philosophers alluded to: The influx of outsiders and foreigners through the deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration. Who voted for this? Only this week, shockingly, we learned that the population of England and Wales is growing at the fastest rate in history, with some 707,000 people added last year and some 2.5million since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. Who voted for this? Seriously? Who voted for this population explosion, for a pace and scale of change that is now leaving many of our communities and our country unrecognisable? Who asked for their leaders to add the equivalent of the entire Greater Manchester area in only four years? And just look at how dramatic and historically unprecedented this is. Between the election of Margaret Thatcher, in 1979, and Tony Blair, in 1997, the annual rate of population increase in England and Wales never surpassed a peak of 188,000 people in a single year, and averaged roughly 111,000 people over each 12-month period. 11 But since Covid? Well, thanks to policies introduced by the hapless 'Uniparty', by politicians on both the Left and Right who are now openly ignoring what the people want, if not treating them with total contempt, these numbers have rocketed. Some 618,000 people were added to our population in the year to June 2022. Another 821,000 in the following 12 months. And now, in the year to June 2024, as we learned this week, another 707,000. What is the main reason for this? Well, it's definitely not what's called 'natural growth' among the native English and Welsh people — the kind of growth that ensures a country grows and evolves at a natural pace, where change is manageable. No. Far from it. Almost all of our population growth today is because of mass immigration, with 1.1million people migrating into England and Wales in the 12 months to June 2024, and 452,200 leaving. Think about that. Around 1.1million people in just one year — equivalent to adding a city the size of Liverpool, comprised entirely of migrants, in just 12 months. This is insane. Claims are nonsense And on top of that we can add another fact we discovered this week, which is that the number of small boat crossings this year alone has now surged above 25,000, up 51 per cent on the same point last year, and taking the total to more than 170,000 illegal migrants since 2018. The foreign-born and their descendants will emerge as a majority by the early 2070s. And roughly one in every four people on these islands will be following Islam by the end of the current century. What would those ancient thinkers have made of this, too, I wonder? A nation-state that cannot even control its own borders, where mainly young men of fighting age from distant lands are flooding freely into our country on a daily basis? In Westminster, our completely hapless politicians will try to distract you and downplay all this by blabbering something like 'we have always had an asylum problem', or, even worse, 'we have always been a nation of immigrants'. Both of these claims are nonsense. If you want to get a sense of just how historic and unprecedented this population explosion really is then consider just one astonishing fact, shared this week by an expert on the topic, Dr Paul Morland. In every single year since Tony Blair came to power, since 1997, there has been more immigration into these islands than there was throughout the entire period between the Anglo-Saxon era in the 5th and 6th Centuries and World War Two. At least until the last quarter-century, in other words, this country was defined by what those ancient thinkers thought was essential to maintaining the unity and survival of a state — a stable population with manageable rates of change, and where, on the whole, the people did trust their leaders because those leaders did make an attempt to listen and respond to the people. But today all that is long gone. Today, in sharp contrast, we are living in a much more fragile and febrile civilisation where, as the likes of Pericles and Cicero warned, our leaders are no longer fulfilling their first duty of keeping their own people safe. Far from it. Our borders are completely and utterly out of control. We do not know who is coming in and who is going out of the country. Bound by shared history We have even discovered that our own leaders have been importing members of the Taliban, alongside thousands of other Afghans, while gagging the Press and refusing to tell their own people. And now, because of this policy of mass uncontrolled immigration — a policy that nobody in this country ever voted for — we have a sense of what is about to unfold. White Britons are now forecast to become a minority in this country by the year 2063, and much sooner for the under-40s. 11 11 The foreign-born and their descendants will emerge as a majority by the early 2070s. And roughly one in every four people on these islands will be following Islam by the end of the current century. Unless something changes, and changes soon, then all these trends will only accelerate in the years ahead, completely transforming our communities and nation, and ushering in enough people to fill six cities the size of Birmingham in the next 12 years alone. The English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once said that a nation is held together by something deeper than a contract — it is bound by a shared history, a shared culture and the sense we belong to one another. Is it even possible to maintain things like a shared sense of history and culture when millions of people are being added to the population, more than 80 per cent of whom are today coming from outside Europe. But how on Earth can we ever hope to hold a nation together that is experiencing this scale of population change? That is imposing policies and broken borders on a people who never voted for this, and never asked for it. And how, we might also ask, is it even possible to maintain things like a shared sense of history and culture when millions of people are being added to the population, more than 80 per cent of whom are today coming from outside Europe? I do not know for certain what those ancient thinkers Pericles and Cicero would make of it were they to come back to life and assess the state of Britain today. I suspect that, like thousands of years ago, they'd warn we are living in a civilisation that looks set to crumble from within — a place where our leaders no longer appear all that interested in fulfilling their responsibility to the people and where mass immigration is blowing apart that once sacred bond between the rulers and the ruled. And for these reasons alone, they would probably conclude that unless we can somehow find our way to a radical change of direction then our civilisation, as we currently know it, will most likely not survive. 11 11 11
Daily Mail
5 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Euronext eyes Stock Exchange bid amid deals frenzy
Euronext would consider buying London's stock market if it is put up for sale. Chief executive Stephane Boujnah said London Stock Exchange's parent had shifted towards data and analytics services. His comments come amid a crisis in the City amid a takeover frenzy. New York has been the primary destination for defectors, with fintech darling Wise its most recent scalp. Delivery giant Just Eat and travel operator Tui have both chosen European capitals in recent years. Euronext operates across Europe and recently offered to buy Athens Stock Exchange for £360m. Boujnah described Euronext as 'home sweet home' for firms bridging domestic industries and international markets. He noted that the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), which owns the UK stock market, has increasingly shifted towards data and analytics following its acquisition of Refinitiv in 2021. But LSEG boss David Schwimmer said 'it gets a lot of focus, a lot of attention, a lot of capital and a lot of support'. LSEG's 'broader scale' allows it to work on the exchange's behalf in dealings with companies, ministers and regulators, he added.
