Cost of living crisis: Liz Truss could strip ‘high earners of £400 energy bill support’

A group of 70 charities and community groups signed a letter calling on the two Tory leadership candidates to commit to a doubling in the £1,200 package of support going to the most vulnerable households.

Dan Paskins from Save the Children, said: “At the very least, the government should double the emergency support package announced in May to ensure families are shielded from a catastrophic winter.”

Paul Kissack, chief executive at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which organised the letter, said: “Planning for a substantial support package needs to start immediately. Without it, vulnerable people will face a catastrophe on a vast scale when winter sets in.”

Adam Scorer, chief executive of National Energy Action charity, said the Treasury’s reported plan to reduce the energy price cap by £400 this January “doesn’t seem proportionate” to the crisis faced by families.

“It doesn’t seem like a plan yet,” he told Times Radio. “It won’t avoid the costs for people on the lowest incomes and quite honestly, it doesn’t seem proportionate to the cost of living crisis that many are facing and fearing.”

He added: “Government, prime ministerial candidates and opposition parties are only just waking up to the scale of the intervention that is required … They have to wake up.”

Liz Truss could strip high earners of the £400 autumn energy bills support, a treasury secretary has suggested.

Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury and a key backer of Ms Truss, said it was “odd” that wealthy people would also benefit from the handout, and if made prime minister, the foreign secretary would examine whether this could be blocked.

“As Conservatives, we ought to surely believe in targeting taxpayer money as best we can so that we actually achieve the best value and keep the burden on the exchequer as low as we can,” Mr Clarke told the Sunday Telegraph.

“It is not an ideal outcome, putting it very mildly, that people who don’t need it are receiving quite substantial sums of money from the state. That is not, frankly, a targeted package, is it?”

Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi is thought to have asked Treasury officials to draw up plans to cut gas and electricity bills by an extra £400 in January through a new lending scheme for energy providers.

It comes as Labour joined the Liberal Democrats in calling for the energy price cap rise – expected to hike annual bills to almost £3,600 – to be frozen in October.

While Treasury officials are not proposing to freeze the price cap rise this October, they are considering ways to bring January’s price cap down by about £400 per household, according to the Sunday Times.

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Nicola Sturgeon said Boris Johnson has been the only prime minister she has worked with who was “a disgrace to the office”.

Speaking at a panel event at the Edinburgh Fringe on Saturday afternoon, hosted by broadcaster Ayesha Hazarika, Ms Sturgeon called the prime minister a “disgrace”.

She said: “I disagreed with David Cameron, I disagreed with Theresa May, I disagreed with Boris Johnson, but he’s the only one who’s actually disgraced the office of prime minister.”

Several Labour MPs have defied the stance taken by party leader Sir Keir Starmer by appearing at picket lines in a show of support for train drivers striking over pay.

Rail passengers were hit by widespread disruption on Saturday as thousands of members of the Aslef rail union – drivers from nine operating companies – staged a 24-hour strike.

Senior Labour MPs have been warned not to visit staff at picket lines outside train stations, but left-wingers Dawn Butler and Barry Gardiner joined drivers at Willesden station in west London.

And frontbencher Kate Osborne, a parliamentary private secretary in the shadow Northern Ireland team, joined striking staff at Newcastle station. “I will always support workers in struggle … workers need a pay rise,” she tweeted.

Despite all the talk of coming together when this is over, and how much Liz Truss prefers Rishi Sunak to Keir Starmer, it seems that the candidates and their supporters cannot help themselves, John Rentoul writes. In Cheltenham on Thursday, Sunak said Truss’s plans would “leave millions of incredibly vulnerable people at the risk of real destitution”.

The next day, when the new GDP figures were published, Truss put out a statement implying that it was Sunak who was responsible as chancellor for the “shrinking of the UK economy”.

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Rishi Sunak has set out plans to make Britain “energy secure” – including boosting North Sea gas production – as he seeks to make up ground in the Tory leadership race.

The former chancellor said he would legislate to make the UK “energy independent” by 2045 at the latest as he vowed to ensure there is no repeat of the looming winter crisis.

Mr Sunak confirmed that if he becomes prime minister on 5 September, he would put in place immediate support for households – particularly the most vulnerable – faced with soaring energy bills.

At the same time he pledged urgent action to drive up domestic energy supply with the creation of a new energy security task force and deregulation in the North Sea to allow gas production to increase over the winter.

Liberal Democrats leader Sir Ed Davey has suggested Labour took its plan to freeze the energy price after Sir Keir Starmer unveiled his Party’s plan to ban the increase of energy bills amid falling living standards in the UK.

Writing on Twitter following the announced plan, Mr Davey said: “Hi UK Labour glad you liked my proposal to cancel the energy price rise. I also have some thoughts on electoral reform that you’re welcome to adopt…”

Earlier this week, the Lib Dems called on October’s expected energy price cap rise to be scrapped, with the cost covered by a windfall tax on energy company profits.

The Energy Price Cap Increase (Cancellation) Bill would make Ofgem maintain the existing rates, saving households an average of £1,400 this year, the Lib Dems said.

The bill would also make the government produce a report into extending and backdating the windfall tax on oil and gas company profits to help cover the cost.

Rishi Sunak has been accused of undermining the government’s climate policy as he vowed to boost the production of oil and gas in the North Sea through a new deregulation drive.

The Tory leadership contender has set out plans to extract more domestic fossil fuels, claiming that he will order a new licensing round for oil and gas drilling permits “immediately” – with a further round from 2024 – if he becomes PM.

But climate campaigners told The Independent that his proposals are “utterly bewildering”. They argued that the proposals do nothing to help cut soaring energy bills, and put Mr Sunak’s commitment to the legal target of cutting emissions to zero by 2050 in doubt.

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