Three and a half years after war plunged Europe into an energy supply crisis, millions of households in Great Britain are braced for another winter of painful gas and electricity bills.
On Wednesday, the quarterly cap on charges will increase again. Despite a fall in wholesale gas prices, the ceiling for a typical annual dual-fuel bill will rise by 2% to £1,755 to help cover the costs of energy policies and network upgrades.
Bills are far lower than during the peak of the energy crisis when the government was forced to step in to subsidise costs. But they remain almost £600 a year higher than before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And while the cap has fallen, households have racked up growing debts.
The latest estimates from the industry regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem, put the money owed to energy suppliers at a record high of £4.4bn as of June, an annual rise of more than £750m. In the same month, government figures revealed that a record proportion of British households were unable to pay t
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