Heating Oil Households Face Winter Without a Cap
The government has accepted that the heating oil market needs tighter regulation, promising clearer compensation, more competition and a review of minimum order sizes. It has not proposed a price cap and has set no date. Prices have close to doubled in a year, with one customer quoted 111p a litre.
About 1.5 million United Kingdom households heat their homes with oil and none of them is protected by the energy price cap, which covers only mains gas and electricity. The exposure is heavily regional: around 60% of Northern Ireland households use heating oil, and the regulator’s remit there is separate again. The competition authority found that 1,700 households were forced to reorder at significantly higher prices or go without fuel after the war began, at a cost of up to £350 each, and the minimum order of 500 litres is now to be reviewed against tanks that hold between 1,000 and 2,000. A £53m support package announced in March was distributed by councils on their own criteria, so what a household received depended on where it lived. The energy minister Polly Billington said customers “felt they had nowhere to turn” and that energy “is an essential good”. One supplier’s chief executive was blunter about what regulation will not do: it will not reduce the price, and what the trade wants is VAT removed.