Energy websites crash amid rush to submit meter readings

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Have you submitted your meter reading? From tomorrow, the energy price cap will rise for 22 million households. Those on default tariffs paying by direct debit will see an increase of £693 to £1,971.

The point of sending a reading today is to ensure energy companies can’t assign some of your current usage to April when rates will be roughly 54 per cent higher. Traffic has been such that the websites of numerous firms have crashed.

More broadly, April really is cost of living crunch month. In addition to energy bills there is:

  • The 1.25 percentage point rise in National Insurance contributions
  • Council tax bills will breach the £2,000 barrier for thousands of Londoners for the first time
  • Mobile phone and broadband customers face mid-contract rises
  • The rate of VAT on eating and drinking goes up from 12.5 per cent to 20 per cent which is almost certain to mean higher restaurant bills
  • Food producers are warning of rocketing production costs. British egg farmers today said that higher energy and chicken feed bills have added 25p to 30p to the costs per dozen 

This is not, of course, to say that many people were not struggling already. But part of the reason behind the electoral success the Conservative Party has enjoyed since 2010 – a period when real wages have largely stagnated – is that enough people in their electoral coalition were shielded from the most severe impacts of austerity.

Some got on the housing ladder thanks to Help to Buy, even though the scheme pushed up prices by boosting demand and according to a recent House of Lords report, did “not provide good value for money.”

Older women meanwhile benefited from the triple lock on pensions. A couple of years ago, Anna Sanders and Rosalind Shorrocks of the London School of Economics examined the impact of austerity on vote choice in the 2015 and 2017 general elections.

They found that, between 2010 and 2016, the basic state pension – upon which women are more reliant as a source of income – increased by 22.2%, compared to a growth in earnings of 7.6% and a growth in prices of 12.3%.

In a first-past-the-post electoral system, you only need to win enough of the vote in efficiently located areas (marginal constituencies) to form a majority or at least be the largest party.

So why might next time be more difficult for the Tories? Putting to one side Partygate, Brexit’s lower salience and the fact that by 2024 they will have been in government for 15 years, the fact is that inflation affects everyone. Not equally, but broadly. For goodness sake, won’t somebody please think of the caviar connoisseurs?

Elsewhere in the paper, the untold story of the dogs (and cats, mice and rats) of the Ukraine war. David Cohen and Lucy Young report from Csengersima on the Romanian-Hungarian border.

In the comment pages, Martha Gill asks whether Putin’s barbaric war will finally flush away Nigel Farage’s apologist fringe?

And I pay tribute to Shane Warne, but it’s about more than that. My guilt for caring so much about a cricketer in the middle of a war, and how his early death is a reminder that in test cricket as in life, it is not always possible to make up time later in the day.

And finally, in what won’t be a surprise to commuters, the Northern Line has been labelled the Tube’s noisiest. Levels of up to 109.5 decibels were recorded, with the issue said to be worst on the High Barnet branch between Euston and Tufnell Park. More on how other lines fair here.

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