vivweb01blog

Warning to low Electricity and Gas users:  If you are anything other than a high user of both fuels, don't be tempted by offers from your supplier to fix your tariffs now. These are coming in thick and fast on the back of the latest price cap rise, with OFGEM  actually 'co-conspiring' with suppliers to try to get you to fix. The rationale being peddled is to "...protect yourself against future price cap rises...". If you do succumb to the temptation, however, you'll lock yourself into a contract lasting at least a year with exit penalties, and won't be able to take advantage of any No- or reduced-SC tariffs that appear this winter....companies want to avoid subscribers switching to these tariffs, since they know they could lose money as a result, and are using fixing as a deterrent, so beware. One item of note to surface very recently is that EDF are now offering a fixed rate product with a reduced SC in a desperate effort to get you to fix. This suggests ...

  Editor's note: Please see the recent update at the end of this text for analysis of the Winter Fuel reversal announcement in in June 2025, and its implications.....You may also be interested in a more recent update on the recent rumours that Reeves may introduce means testing for the State Pension itself in this November's budget....  ----------------------------- Now that the dust has well and truly settled after Reeves’ so-called ‘Halloween Nightmare’ budget in October 2024, let’s take a look at what actually happened to pensioner benefits…and what we might expect to happen in future. We all know about the loss of the Winter Fuel Payment for the majority of pensioners – you would have had to have been living on Mars for the last 3 months not to. Although he obviously thinks it's 'done and dusted', Starmer is not yet out of the woods on that one; although he caved in to the threat of defeat from his back benchers he refused to restore the universal benefit, ...

Last year  I took a look at various options that we in the UK might use for energy conservation as part of a wider review of our energy crisis and its consequences.  Since then, political parties of all hues have weighed in on the ‘greening’ debate and there appears to be a general consensus that we need to replace fossil fuels with renewables and nuclear for our energy generation and supply. The only dispute is over how quickly we should do it, and in the UK at least, this is currently tied up with the post-election policy tussle between the two (erstwhile) major parties and Reform. Starmer's recent 'go slower' initiative was designed primarily to wrong-foot the Tories and Reform on their criticism of Miliband's over-hasty introduction of Cameron's so eloquently described 'green crap'. Miliband is, needless to say not happy with the wind being taken out of his sails in this way, and I foresee trouble ahead for Starmer from his 400-strong 'rump' of...