Cost of Heating Oil

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Wednesday 15th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

I am grateful for this opportunity to talk about heating oil in my constituency. About 10% of its households are on heating oil and they have spoken directly to me, both by email and by filling in a survey—I am grateful to everyone who filled in that survey—telling me how much of an impact the issue is having. We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of pounds being added to household bills.

One lady told me:

“We usually pay around £200-£250 per fill up of our small tank, which we need to fill up 2-3”

times

“a year. We’re now at nearly empty and our recent quote has been £750”

for a fill-up. She continues:

“I’m 9 months pregnant, about to go onto a reduced wage and will not be able to afford an additional £1500 this year for oil. Our oil covers both heating and water which are both necessary for looking after a newborn and the rest of our family.”

The challenge that constituents put to me and the challenge to the Government is about fairness, because at the same time as they are talking about further help for households, on all sorts of supplies, in a targeted manner, everyone is benefiting from the cap that is available to ordinary bill payers, and my constituents say to me, “We are not getting anything like that kind of help.”

Although the amount of money that the Government have announced is welcome, it is a drop in the ocean. Per heating oil household, it is something like £30 or £35. If it is targeted, as it will be in my constituency, it is a few hundred pounds for certain households. As I have just illustrated with one example, that will not touch the sides of the additional bills that people are having to pay. We are talking about a huge increase in bills and a lack of Government responsiveness, and this has already happened to people.

Future help is welcome, but already many people are forced to pay hundreds and hundreds of pounds that they had not anticipated and budgeted for. That means vulnerable people, people on median incomes, are sitting with their heating turned off and worried about whether they can afford their bills for the rest of the year, so it is vital that the Government listen much more strongly to the thousands and thousands of people across the south-east and the many more across the country who simply cannot afford to pay hundreds and hundreds of pounds in additional bills out of nowhere in the way they are having to.

--- Later in debate ---

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Dr Allin-Khan. I am grateful to the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) for securing this important debate. I must start by declaring an interest: my home is off the gas grid, and we use heating oil. When constituents have raised this issue with me—many have—I therefore understand it not just as their Member of Parliament, but as a fellow purchaser of heating oil.

When prices doubled—or, as we heard, sometimes tripled—overnight following the outbreak of war in the middle east, it was a genuine financial shock that was even greater than when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. According to evidence from Martin Lewis of Money Saving Expert, customers who had paid around £300 to £350 for 500 litres of heating oil in February were being quoted between £600 and £1,000 just weeks later, and that price continues to go up. That is not a marginal increase. For families on fixed or modest incomes—not just the poorest households—that is the kind of bill that forces a choice between heating, eating and other necessities.

So far, the Government have allocated £53 million in very targeted financial support across the United Kingdom, as we have heard. They have announced intentions to introduce consumer protections, including dispute resolution, greater price transparency and enhanced protections for vulnerable groups. To be fair, they have asked the Competition and Markets Authority to examine the market, and have signalled that an energy independence Bill will include powers to establish an ombudsman or appoint a regulator.

I acknowledge all those steps—they are not nothing—but let us be honest about what they amount to in practice. As we have heard, in Northern Ireland, where almost two thirds of households rely on heating oil, the allocation amounts to roughly £35 per household. The First Minister of Northern Ireland described it as a “slap in the face”; the Finance Minister said it was “significantly below par”. In Scotland, eligible households can apply for £300 in support. In England, the money flows through local authority crisis and resilience funds—I particularly note the example given from Norfolk.

Are Ministers confident that funding is actually reaching people in every part of our country at the pace and scale required? The evidence from many places suggests that the answer is not a straightforward yes. Also, why has LPG—this has come up in the debate—not been more consistently included in the scope of support? LPG users are in much the same position as heating oil customers—off grid, without alternatives and facing the same challenges—yet they have too often been an afterthought in support announcements. That needs to be addressed.

The problem is not confined to households. I have heard from businesses, some in my constituency, that are dependent on oil and LPG, including a pub that has had to completely close its kitchen and food offering because the cost of running it has become prohibitive. Thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises across rural Britain are in the same position, and the Government have not even attempted to support those businesses. That needs to change.

That is the structural failure at the heart of this debate. Unlike gas or electricity, the heating oil market is not regulated by Ofgem. There is no ombudsman or binding transparency requirement. The Competition and Markets Authority is now examining the market, which I welcome, but the CMA’s own chief executive has acknowledged troubling reports of cancelled orders and sudden price increases. That is precisely the kind of sharp practice that exploits the absence of regulation, examples of which Members have raised in this debate.

We should end the practice of accepting orders without stating a clear, binding price up front, only for consumers to receive a bill on delivery significantly higher than anticipated. That is not a complex regulatory ask; it is basic consumer protection. When someone agrees to take delivery of heating oil, they should know what price they are paying before the tanker arrives, not after. The Government’s promise of an ombudsman and stronger consumer protection signals the right direction of travel, but it is a promise of future action, not present support. Rural households and businesses cannot wait for primary legislation to wend its way through Parliament before they receive the most basic of protections.

I say to the Minister: adequate support means three things. It means emergency financial assistance that is genuinely proportionate to the scale of the crisis, not the equivalent of £35 per household, when those households are facing hundreds if not thousands of pounds in additional bills. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and other Conservative colleagues, including myself, were the first to write to the CMA to investigate failings in the sector. I urge the Minister to continue to examine that “at pace”, which I think is the fashionable term, to get this right in future.

We are also urging for LPG users to be treated with equal importance to heating oil consumers. That means immediate binding price transparency requirements, so that consumers know what they are paying before they commit. Around 1.5 million households across the UK rely on heating oil. They are disproportionately older, rural and without alternatives. They deserve better than warm words and a timetable that seems to stretch endlessly into the future.

[Dr Mullan]

On a point of order, Dr Allin-Khan. I should have declared an interest as a heating oil user and someone directly involved.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Martin McCluskey)]

I thought we were about to end up in an “I am Spartacus” moment. [Laughter.] It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. I thank the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) for raising this vital issue and giving us the opportunity to discuss it at length, since it is an important area that is dominating much thinking among Members and in my Department.

It is important at the outset to put this in the wider context of what is happening in the middle east. It is clear from what we have heard over the past few weeks that the conflict in the middle east is not Britain’s war. The Prime Minister made the right judgment in not taking the country into offensive action, but how we emerge from this crisis will define us for a generation in how we respond. It is clear that we need to de-escalate the situation in the middle east. We need a negotiated settlement that allows the free passage of traffic through the strait of Hormuz. That will ultimately determine the fate of energy prices and our constituents’ cost of living.

Let me do three things. First, I want to respond to issues raised around the immediate support the Government have offered. Secondly, I will talk a little more about market reform and regulation, and the process going on with the CMA. Finally, I will talk about some of the wider structural issues discussed this morning.

As hon. Members have mentioned, 1.5 million households in the UK use heating oil to keep their homes warm. We know from what has been said this morning, and also from looking at what has been happening in the market, that the price of a litre of heating oil has increased significantly—doubled, in fact—since the war in the middle east began. Even before the situation in the middle east developed, the cost of living crisis was a priority for the Government. Hon. Members know that we have till the end of June. This does not apply to those on heating oil, as we will discuss, but energy prices have been reduced under the price cap by 7% until the end of June, and the Government were taking other measures to alleviate the cost of living even before the middle east situation started.

I want to be candid with people about the choices that we had to make. Under the last Government, it took around 200 days for support to come to heating oil customers. We have rolled out support within two and a half weeks, but there is a trade-off when we make such decisions, and the decision that we made was to prioritise speed at this point, which meant deploying funding through local authorities in England and through devolved Governments elsewhere in the UK. That does, however, limit our ability to stipulate what the criteria are, but that is the trade-off we had to make. Listening to hon. Members this morning, I think we have made the right choice in prioritising speed because the need is clearly great right now. Had we been sitting here saying that the Government were coming up with a far more extensive scheme that might take months to deliver, I think we would have had a very different sort of debate this morning.

[Dr Mullan]

The Minister has made the point about wanting a simple scheme that he could get into place rapidly, but he did not put enough money into it, and there was no reason in terms of speed why he could not do that.

[Martin McCluskey]

No one has said that this is the extent of all the support that will be on offer: I have been very clear about that, both in the Chamber and whenever I have been asked the question. The point of immediate support now was to provide people with relief from an immediate crisis. We have been very clear—the Chancellor was and the Secretary of State was—that it was never intended to provide discretionary support for every single heating oil user to fill up their tank. It was to provide immediate relief quickly from a pressing crisis that we were facing across the country. We are keeping everything under review. Were we in a situation later in the year where we need to look at providing further support, we will make decisions then, but right now that support is on offer to people.

Different local authorities are taking different approaches. That is in the nature of the trade-off that we had to make. North Norfolk is taking an approach that looks at means-tested benefits, but North Northamptonshire is not taking an approach that relies on means-tested benefits. It is asking for evidence that people are not able to afford a payment, which involves, for example, giving over bank statements to enable people to make an assessment based on income rather than on means-testing. So different authorities are taking different approaches. That is what we have to accept if we are deploying this through the crisis and resilience fund and not having a centralised scheme as we did before. But as I said, this is about doing things at speed to make sure that people have the support they need.

On the situation in Northern Ireland, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) highlighted that almost two thirds of homes rely on heating oil. We have allocated £17 million to support them. Again, we will keep that under review. We have heard complaints from the Northern Ireland Executive, as we have heard from others this morning, that it is not enough. But as I understand it—the hon. Member might want to correct me—there is not currently a scheme through the Northern Ireland Executive to deploy that money, so we do not yet know what the demand actually is in Northern Ireland for the take-up of that funding.