Inside Politics: Sunak urged to act as energy bills soar

Energy regulator to lift price cap, increasing household bills by hundreds of pounds, writes Matt Mathers

Thursday 03 February 2022 08:43 GMT

The Treasury must do more to crack down on fraud, MPs have said (Stefan Rousseau / PA) (PA Wire)

Boris Johnson’s government yesterday set out a grand strategy to ‘level up’ the country as the prime minister asked voters to give him until 2030 to see the plan through. But back in the reality of here and now, millions of households are about to be hit with a staggering rise in their energy bills – and ministers have so far done nothing to help with rising costs. Rishi Sunak is under increasing pressure to act and reports this morning say he is set to announce some relief in the form of council tax rebates. Elsewhere, the DUP has threatened to suspend Irish Sea border checks and London and Moscow have been trading barbs on the Ukraine crisis.

Inside the bubble

Commons proceedings get underway with transport questions at 9.30am. Next up are any urgent questions followed by the increasingly must-watch business statement by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Commons leader. Main business will be back bench debates on the government’s education catch-up and the code of conduct for MPs.

Coming up:

– Foreign Office minister James Cleverly on BBC Radio 4 Today at 8.10am

– Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Pat McFadden on GB News at 8.50am

Daily Briefing

LIGHTS OUT: Britain’s cost of living crisis hits a crunch point today as millions of people across the country find out by how much their energy bills are set to rise. In an announcement expected at 11am, energy regulator Ofgem will lift its cap, with prices set to rise by around 50 per cent, leaving some 20 million homes with an estimated hike of hundreds of pounds to their annual bills. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, has been under growing pressure to set out measures to help families struggling with their bills and will commit to giving households in council tax bands A to C rebates funded by government grants under targeted measures for poorer households, according to The Times. The Treasury did not rule out the move nor did it deny that the chancellor could announce state-backed loans to energy companies to give all homes a discount on their energy bills of £200, as has been reported previously. Suppliers said this would be a step in the right direction but the £200 figure falls far short of what is needed. Labour has repeatedly called for a windfall tax on oil and gas giants to help with rising prices. The party has also proposed cutting VAT from energy bills for one year, while increasing the Warm Homes discount to 9.3 million people. We’ll have live politics updates throughout the day here.

DRIP DRIP DRIP: Boris Johnson is by no means out of the woods on the partygate scandal and serious questions continue to be raised about his leadership after former minister Sir Gary Streeter became the twelfth Tory MP to publicly confirm that he had submitted his no confidence letter to 1922 Committee chair Sir Graham Brady. “I previously made it clear in response to the many emails I have received about the parties in Downing Street that appeared to break Lockdown rules, that the wise thing to do was to await the report from Sue Gray,” the South West Devon MP said in a statement. “This has now been received (albeit in truncated form) and I have made my decision. I cannot reconcile the pain and sacrifice of the vast majority of the British Public during lockdown with the attitude and activities of those working in Downing Street.”

CAUSE FOR CONCERN?: Sir Gary’s intervention marked another hugely damaging day for the prime minister, who was also hit with letters from Totnes MP Anthony Mangnall and Commons defence committee chair Tobias Ellwood. Should the PM be worried about the letters? The general consensus is that Sir Gary is not a troublemaker and that if MPs like him are calling time on Johnson’s premiership then No 10 should be worried. There is nothing yet to suggest that the ‘drip drip’ of letters is a coordinated effort by MPs to out Johnson, but Tory whips may find the trickle more difficult to stop than the sort of surge planned, and apparently thwarted, by the ‘pork pie plotters’ in January. Meanwhile, the under fire PM has now refused on at least two occasions to retract his false claim in the Commons that Keir Starmer was behind the failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile. The Labour leader accused him of “parroting violent fascists” with the Savile smear, as the pair clashed over the row at the beginning of PMQs on Wednesday.

EDWIN POOTS EU ON NOTICE: There has been a lot of noise and tough talk about Brexit’s Northern Ireland protocol over the past few months but last night there was a major development in this seemingly never-ending saga. With his party’s support in the polls collapsed and May’s local assembly elections just around the corner, Edwin Poots, the DUP’s agriculture minister, halted checks on goods passing through the Irish Sea border, in an apparent breach of international law and the Brexit deal, although Poots says he has received legal advice to the contrary. He ordered his top civil servant to act by removing the checks by midnight ,although it was unclear whether the permanent secretary, Anthony Harbinson, would comply. Opposition parties accused the DUP, which has for months been campaigning to have the protocol scrapped, of a “stunt”. It is unclear exactly what is happening at NI ports this morning, although reports say lorries were still being received at a Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs checking facility in Belfast Port. Several vehicles entered the facility after the ferry arrived from Cairnryan in Scotland at 6am but a staff member declined to confirm whether checks were continuing. The EU is yet to respond but is unlikely to take kindly to the move.

MOSCOW TOUGH TALK: Away from the domestic front, there is no let up in tough talk between the UK and Russia as Moscow troops continue to linger on the Ukraine border in preparation for a possible invasion. In a phone call with Vladimir Putin which was delayed because he was dealing with the partygate scandal, Johnson warned the Russian president that pressing ahead with a military offensive would be a “tragic miscalculation”. No 10 said the PM expressed his “deep concern” over “hostile activity” against Ukraine, with as many as 100,000 Russian troops estimated to be amassing on the country’s border. It came just hours after Royal Air Force typhoon fighter jets were scrambled to intercept “unidentified aircraft” – later identified as four Russian Bear planes – approaching a UK “area of interest”, according to an RAF spokesperson. Russia, meanwhile, took a far less cordial approach to its diplomatic relations with the UK as the Kremlin accused the PM of being “utterly confused” and attacked Lizz Truss, the foreign secretary, over what it described as her “stupidity”.

On the record

“Here we go again — he asked exactly the same questions as I recall in the chamber a few days ago. I can tell him what has been going on in Downing Street in November and throughout, we have been delivering the fastest vaccine and booster rollout anywhere in Europe and we have been getting people back into work, and we have been helping to bring the West together to defy what I think is completely unacceptable threats of intimidation from the Putin regime against Ukraine. And that’s what we have been doing.”

PM again refuses to answer if he attended alleged ‘The Winner Takes It All’ gathering in his flat, which is being probed by Met Police.

From the Twitterati

“The defining mission of the PM & this government is to level up the whole of the UK. On the very day we are setting out steps to make this happen, a handful of egos want to make it all about them. It’s selfish, doing Labours work and it’s really not helping their constituents.”