Fuel poverty cold comfort

But her latest insensitive intervention – “profitability maintains the industry and, when it pays dividends, it pays for pensions as well” – is cold comfort to all those people now living in fuel poverty because bodies like Energy UK, and the industry’s powerless regulator Ofgem, have not done enough to help families, despite lukewarm promises to do so.

And this is not due to the energy industry’s failure to explain its finances – the claim of Ms Knight and former energy minister Michael Spicer – but the breakdown of a privatisation policy that was supposed to keep household bills in check while also addressing issues of supply.

This is why EDF Energy’s decision to limit its price increase to 3.9 per cent was greeted with so much scepticism. Though it is closer to inflation than its rivals, many believe it is a short-term measure to win over new customers before normal service is resumed.

Yet, contrary to the intransigence of Ms Knight and her industry, fuel poverty – those instances where households spend more than 10 per cent of their income on keeping their home reasonably warm – is on the increase.

And it is not restricted to traditional areas of social deprivation – one quarter 
of households in Yorkshire’s rural heartlands now meet the fuel poverty definition, including people living in those towns and idylls which are among the most prosperous in Britain. It is a state of affairs that will only get worse until the energy industry takes note of its social responsibilities. Profit should not come at any price.

Charles offers more food for thought

ON the eve of his 65th birthday, and eligibility to special entitlements like a free bus pass, it can be said with absolute certainty that the Prince of Wales is this country’s most passionate – and influential – supporter of rural communities.

When he says that the British countryside is “the unacknowledged backbone of our national identity and “as precious as any of our great cathedrals”, he is speaking from a lifetime of experience – and in contrast to the “here today and gone tomorrow” politicians who run Defra, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Yet a special issue of Country Life, edited by Prince Charles, also reveals his frustration at the pricing policies of the supermarkets. “It cannot be right that a typical hill farmer earns just £12,600, with some surviving on as little as £8,000 a year, whilst the big retailers and their shareholders do so much better out of the deal, having taken none of the risk,” he observes.

This will chime with the everyday experiences of those farming in the Yorkshire Dales and eleswhere, but will anyone at Defra listen? And, if nothing happens now after such a powerful intervention, who will

speak up for farmers when Charles succeeds to the throne? Both quandaries provide much food for thought.

Charles offers more food for thought

ON the eve of his 65th birthday, and eligibility to special entitlements like a free bus pass, it can be said with absolute certainty that the Prince of Wales is this country’s most passionate – and influential – supporter of rural communities.

When he says that the British countryside is “the unacknowledged backbone of our national identity and “as precious as any of our great cathedrals”, he is speaking from a lifetime of experience – and in contrast to the “here today and gone tomorrow” politicians who run Defra, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Yet a special issue of Country Life, edited by Prince Charles, also reveals his frustration at the pricing policies of the supermarkets. “It cannot be right that a typical hill farmer earns just £12,600, with some surviving on as little as £8,000 a year, whilst the big retailers and their shareholders do so much better out of the deal, having taken none of the risk,” he observes.

This will chime with the everyday experiences of those farming in the Yorkshire Dales and eleswhere, but will anyone at Defra listen? And, if nothing happens now after such a powerful intervention, who will

speak up for farmers when Charles succeeds to the throne? Both quandaries provide much food for thought.