Andrew Vine: The pensioners reduced to tears as Big Six energy firms rake in profits

Time is not being kind to them. Ailments seem to accumulate by the month, and frailty has them both in its grip. Getting around is increasingly difficult, and their confidence is draining away.

Together, they worry incessantly about being able to manage, and individually each worries how the other will cope alone in the years to come.

Yet they count their blessings, principally a close and loving family and a wide circle of friends, who chip in to help and visit often. Theirs is a home filled with company, animated conversation and laughter.

Tears are rare, but they came. The reason? They are worried to the point of despair about the gas and electricity bill for the winter ahead, which, unless the weather is freakishly warm, will all but wipe out their entire income for a month and force them to dip into their dwindling pot of savings.

The mathematics of their plight are stark, and spell out the human cost of energy price hikes that enrich the Big Six supply companies at the expense of forcing the most vulnerable into poverty.

My friends have a combined monthly income of about £1,300 from their occupational pensions and the state pension. Until the financial crisis sent interest rates tumbling, they could also count on a few hundred pounds a year extra from their life savings, which allowed them to treat themselves now and again. Any income from their savings is now negligible.

Naturally, they worked hard and honestly all their lives, never asking for a penny from the state. They were never wealthy, but managed their money wisely, saving for a rainy day, buying their own home, downsizing to a bungalow because it would be easier to manage for just the two of them as they grew older.

They certainly didn’t consider themselves poor. They know all too many of their generation have to manage on far less, and considered themselves fortunate. Their £1,300 a month was enough. Until two winters ago, when relentless annual price hikes, introduced with breathtaking cynicism in time for the coldest months, really began to bite.

Last year’s bill for the heaviest quarter came to just under £1,100, which left them £200 to manage on for the month when it arrived. That would not even pay for their food, let alone council tax, water rates and the phone bill.

There was no option for them but to draw on their ever-diminishing savings to make it through the month. Another 10 per cent on top of that bill in the latest price rises will leave them with less than £100.

If the energy companies hike prices by a further 10 per cent next year, they will complete the humiliation of this decent elderly couple by totally wiping out their income for a month.

David Cameron’s review of green levies that push up bills, or Sir John Major’s call for a windfall tax on energy companies, will do nothing to help them in the short term. Advice to put on extra sweaters is laughably contemptible. Their frailty makes them feel the cold, and they already wear multiple layers to keep warm, even with the heating on.

Switching suppliers is pointless, despite vociferous denials, the Big Six are operating what amounts to a cartel.

Family and friends have done everything they can to help keep their modest, two-bedroom home warm and the bills down. It is double-glazed throughout, and over the past few years, we have lagged the loft in accordance with Government guidelines, and lifted floorboards to lag the pipes.

We have hung heavier and thicker curtains, and put draught excluders everywhere. We have had the cavity wall insulated and the newest, most energy-efficient boiler that British Gas could supply installed.

We have put in low-energy light bulbs, and, as funds have allowed, replaced older household appliances with new whose selling point is that they are cheaper to run. Clothes are now washed once a week in one large batch, instead of several smaller ones, with the temperature of the machine set at 30 degrees instead of 40.

At the weekend, we looked again at what we might be able to do to keep the bills down. Is there something we’ve overlooked? If there is, none of us could think of it. There were no draughts from windows or doors, the boiler has just been serviced and is running at peak efficiency, no light is left on where it is not needed, and nor is the television left on standby.

So we’ve done all we can, and yet heat will still leak out of the house. Limiting the use of the central heating is out of the question for my friends, since that would only aggravate their ailments.

They have no choice but to pay up and manage as best they can. Effectively, they are being mugged, except the culprit is not some low-life who knocks them down in the street, but the energy industry, whose leaders have pulled off the unenviable feat of supplanting bankers as the most reviled figures in the corporate world ahead of today’s Parliamentary hearings.

Of course, my friends will not spend this winter hungry or cold, or be unable to pay their bills. Their family will see to that. But others will not be so fortunate, and if those responsible for energy price rises cared to notice, they could measure the consequences of their greed in elderly people’s tears of despair.