Consumer Energy Bills: Government Support

Afzal Khan Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government support for consumer energy bills.

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairship for the first time, Ms Jardine. This morning, hon. Members may have caught the same package on the breakfast news as I did. It followed Ukrainians on the outskirts of Kyiv who had been without heating for more than two weeks. They have suffered in conditions unthinkable to those of us in modern Britain, with temperatures in some places dropping to minus 20° overnight. The pictures —of children with frozen faces wearing four or five coats, and grandmothers slipping on sheets of ice that had formed on the floors of their apartments—were heartbreaking.

I hope that hon. Members will indulge my making that aside at the start of my remarks; as I watched those scenes, I could not help but feel alarmed at the sense that Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian energy infrastructure mirrors the shockwaves it has wilfully sent across Europe’s traditional energy mix since it first crossed the Ukrainian border nearly four years ago. Those shockwaves were amplified in the UK when they collided with the unstable economic conditions wrought by Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, whose impacts are still rumbling on today.

We are fortunate in this country not to suffer temperatures consistently way below 0°, and especially lucky not to have to contend with that while bombs rain down on our heads. But the reality of the dangers of cold is present everywhere, and our cost of energy crisis is forcing people to live without heating mere miles from where we stand today, in the world’s sixth largest economy.

It is always innocent, ordinary people—from Kyiv to Kilburn and everywhere in between—who suffer because of huge energy price shocks: ordinary people such as the pensioners in my constituency of Sutton and Cheam, who are living in homes that are sealed shut against the winter, their windows “boarded up” with blankets and towels as they try desperately to keep inside what little heat they can afford.

In the Chamber last week, I mentioned an incident in which I knocked on the door of a resident who answered in a coat and scarf—not because she was going out, but because she did not have the heating on inside; it was around 3° or 4° outside. It happened again yesterday, when I was out canvassing in Worcester Park. I have heard from households that now avoid using their ovens, not out of choice but out of fear of what switching them on will do to their finances. Local hospitals prepare for influxes after cold snaps, because the cold weather thickens blood and causes clots and heart attacks in older people. Anyone who has experienced true cold—awful, core-shaking cold—can only dare to imagine what it feels like for children and older people, whose temperature regulation is developing or fading.

The End Fuel Poverty Coalition estimated that 4,950 excess winter deaths in the UK were caused by living in cold homes during that first chaotic winter of 2022-23.

[Afzal Khan (Manchester Rusholme) (Lab)]

Over 6,000 households in my constituency are living in fuel poverty. The warm homes plan will deliver targeted support for those living in fuel-poor households and provide them with the means to upgrade their homes with insulation, solar panels and heat pumps. Does the hon. Member agree that we should prioritise measures that improve energy efficiency and sustainability to cut fuel bills for years to come?

[Luke Taylor]

Absolutely, and I will come on to the package that the Government outlined last week. It was very welcome, but we need to go further on immediate measures.

More than 12 million households are struggling with high energy bills today. It is not just the cold, but what creeps in with it: the damp and mould in children’s lungs and the reliance, for some families, on heating that produces dangerous carbon monoxide, which presents a threat to life and limb. Let us be clear: in parts of Britain where fuel poverty is all too common, we are at risk of letting one generation slip away slowly, sitting lonely in their homes, shivering, while we raise another forever stunted by a cold childhood.