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Keir Starmer has said that a Labour government would make a massive home insulation programme a “national mission”. Speaking at a building site in Walthamstow, he said insulating homes offered a “longer-term answer” to the energy bills crisis. He said:
We the Labour party have said we should have said we should freeze energy prices, not let those bills go up, and pay for that in part with windfall tax on oil and gas companies, who are making huge, huge profits.
Alongside that, we need a national mission to insulate homes, that’s a longer-term issue. We called for that a year ago now, if the government had done that, we’d have the best part of two million homes insulated.
The big thing here is we need more help for customers from the government. The reality is customers are being asked to pay the price of gas, which is weaponised by Putin, and they shouldn’t be expected to do that alone.
Let’s put it in perspective. The UK’s energy bill is going from maybe £15bn in a normal year to £75bn pounds this year. And that’s the equivalent of maybe 9p or more on the base rate of income tax. No government would announce that, and in the same way, no government should let this go to customers.
This problem predates the Ukrainian war. We have a systemic failure in the energy market. The government does need to intervene. We shouldn’t expect customers to pay the cost of this failure and the Ukraine war …
The government simply needs to step in and pick up this cost like they did in the pandemic. We need £40bn to get through this winter. That’s 10% of what was spent during the pandemic and that’s the only thing that will really sort this problem out.
All through the summer, we’ve been hearing about customers in distress, customers who are worried that they’re not able to heat their homes over this coming winter. That’s why we’re saying to the government, you’ve got to take this decision to freeze prices at their current level right now.
This cannot wait until the 5th or 6th of September. The Conservative party needs to sort themselves out, decide who the leader is going to be this week, so that the Ofgem announcement on the 26th [the rise in the price cap for October] doesn’t have to happen. That is such an imperative.
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