Gordon Browns Fuel Package

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Gordon Browns Fuel Package

Poor old Gordon Brown...nothing he does meets with approval any more. His £1bn fuel package has been slammed by critics as too little too late. Fresh off the back of the embarrassing stamp duty fiasco which saw the mortgage market freeze for weeks while buyers waited for clarification at exactly the worst time, his Father Christmas act has been greeting with shouts of Ba Humbug.

The fuel costs to heat homes has shot up with oil prices so that now the average family can expect to pay over £1400 per year by 2009, up from just under £670 a year in 2005. More than 10% of people are now officially living in fuel poverty and that figure is climbing fast. Fuel poverty is defined as anyone where 10% or more of their income is paid on fuel bills.

Double digit hikes in energy prices in the last 18 months, with more to come have seen the government's plans to eradicate fuel poverty by 2016 go up in smoke, so to speak. People can be seen huddling around the embers...trying to keep warm.

His package included free cavity wall and loft insulation for pensioners and poorer households and all households will get a 50% discount on the work. Half a million customers will have their fuel bills frozen and payments to the most vulnerable will go up from £8.75 a week to £25 a week. This will be paid for by the energy companies themselves who will carry out the work, but many people fear that they will simply pass on the costs to the consumer through higher prices.

Mr Brown rejected calls for a windfall on energy companies and poured scorn on those who said that the bill would eventually be borne by consumers through higher prices. He also dismissed calls that loft insulation would take too long to implement and said that there would be an immediate impact.

Help the aged said in a statement "Individual changes which have been flagged by the Prime Minister are sensible and move in the right direction, but they are too little, too modest and will take too long to address the urgent plight of many pensioners today."

A campaign has been launched to make people aware of the package, but some people referred to it as giving a drowning man swimming lessons. It looks like Mr Browns Autumn re-launch could be as frosty as a pensioner's house this Christmas.