Prices and bills rocket for homes in Yorkshire that rely on oil fired heating

Around 1.5m UK households live off the gas grid and instead use oil to power their boilers including some Yorkshire districts where almost a quarter of homes are oil fired.

Prices have risen by 50 per cent in a year and as oil is not covered by the energy price cap, households have no way of knowing how much higher costs could go.

It also comes as police forces across the region reveal that oil thefts are becoming an increasing trend as the prices go up.

In England, 3.3 per cent of homes use oil heating and in Yorkshire and the Humber, figures show that 2.4 per cent of homes are reliant on it.

Richmondshire is the local authority area where use is highest at 24.4 per cent, followed by Ryedale at 23.6 per cent. Hambleton is 20.5 per cent.

Areas such as Barnsley, Kirklees and Sheffield have less than one per cent of homes that are using oil for heating. Leeds is 0.2 per cent while figures suggest that Hull has no oil-fired houses.

Eight per cent of homes in Wales are oil-fired, the Scottish islands, such as Orkney and Shetland, have higher numbers of oil users and in Northern Ireland around 68 per cent of central heating systems are fuelled by oil.

According to the UK and Ireland Fuel Distributors Association (UKIFDA), oil companies buy oil from refineries or terminals, and store in local depots but can only hold two to three days worth making it difficult to tell consumers how much it will cost because prices are changing rapidly.

Ken Cronin, chief executive, said: “In the first 10 days of the invasion of Ukraine, prices went up between five and 10p a day. They peaked at around £1.40 to £1.50 and where they are now is around 95p to £1.10. When you’ve got prices moving so quickly, it is almost impossible to give customers prices.

“Another challenge for us was that our oil suppliers were moving away from Russia stock which caused shortages and disruption in the market.”

Earlier this week television personality and money saving expert, Martin Lewis, has warned of “civil unrest” amid the country’s worsening cost-of-living crisis.

He said: “We need to keep people fed. We need to keep them warm. If we get this wrong right now, then we get to the point where we start to risk civil unrest. When breadwinners cannot provide, anger brews and civil unrest brews – we are not far off.”

His warning comes as police forces start to see an increase in thefts of oil across the region. Three pubs along the North Yorkshire coast, near Whitby and Scarborough, were targeted last month by the same opportunists in less than two hours who were on the lookout for cooking oil.

The Yorkshire Post submitted Freedom of Information requests to North Yorkshire Police, South Yorkshire Police, West Yorkshire Police and Humberside Police asking for oil theft figures from the beginning of the year to March 9 this year, and also for January 1 to March 31, 2021.

In West Yorkshire there were five oil-related thefts compared to none for the same period in 2021; North Yorkshire Police recorded seven oil thefts for January to March 9 compared to three last year and South Yorkshire Police said there were five thefts recorded both for January to March 2021 and 2022.