After months of speculation over the potential for the average household bill to rise to £3,500 in October 2022 (and over £5,000 in January 2023), Liz Truss, in her first significant announcement as Prime Minister, offered up a guarantee this week. She promised some real security to minimise the price rises and cap the average household bill at £2,500.
Let’s just reiterate that this does still mean household energy bills are around double this winter what they were last winter, but they won’t go up by some of the numbers we were expecting.
In fact, there’s some really clear information with specific numbers available from the Government on domestic energy bills.
But what about businesses? We’ve all seen stories in the media of business owners getting energy bills over 5 times what they previously were. And many of us in the position of running any sort of business premises will have had the same concerns about energy costs within our businesses as at home.
So what about businesses?
Business Energy Price Guarantee – September 2022
Business energy users have never had the same price cap or access to fixed rates that domestic consumers have had. It’s always been harder to bag a deal for businesses.
But Liz did indeed reference businesses in her announcement.
The problem is that the detail is a tad thin on the ground right now.
While the majority of UK non-domestic customers are on fixed price energy deals, some are not. Businesses did not benefit from the Ofgem price cap and there was a risk that some would fall through the gap, unable to fix their energy price and unable to access the kind of support we are making available to households. A new 6 month scheme for businesses and other non-domestic energy users (including charities and public sector organisations like schools) will be offered support as is being provided for consumers.
Below this there’s a promise of more information to follow soon. But for now, we (frankly) don’t know much. But we’ll update this post when we know more. For now, in summary:
The Good News for Business Energy
- Something is being offered to businesses (of some sort) meaning energy costs are unlikely to soar as high as some businesses have been worried.
The Bad News for Business Energy
- While the guarantee for domestic energy users lasts 2 years, the equivalent offering for businesses is for just 6 months
- Energy bills (as in the domestic space) will STILL BE NOTABLY HIGHER than they were last winter. This isn’t a real terms price cut. It’s just that prices won’t be rising as high as they might have
- We really have no specifics
So we await further information and will update this post once we have it.
Header image source, courtesy of uswitch.com
