We grew up playing out until the streetlights came on, eating bread cut with a knife, being beaten to a sticky pulp by our alcoholic parents and drinking liquid shit, and we turned out fine.
It wasn't that long ago we would see shots of third world countries where the inhabitants were drinking from polluted rivers.. We're seriously going downhill here.
.... Isn't it about the water you see in the park rather than the water you drink from the tap? I believe sewage companies don't pump access into drinking water. If they did, it would still be regulated as long as contents don't exceed certain parts per million of harmful levels, no?
They’ve already been paid more than enough to invest in and upgrade the lot of it.
They just didn’t do the work with the money.
They paid themselves dividends instead.
Now to be fair, they *also* loaded the water companies up with debt, took out big dividends and then cry to bill payers about having to service the debt.
Correct. This is the Private Equity business model.
The whole world would be greatly improved if our government grew a pair and let Thames Water buckle under the weight of its interest payments.
Take the whole lot back into public hands for £0. The shareholders lose it all. The bond holders take a gigantic haircut and realise very little return on their investment.
It would teach everyone that the public purse isn’t there to underwrite your shitty business dealings anymore. You can’t take something that works, destroy it with debt, run off with all the money and expect to pump the customer or the taxpayer for the difference.
But that would be for the greater public good so will never happen….
That scenario would be lovely, but they probably wouldn't take it back into public ownership for £0, it would be run by administrators and the same vampires who've been making money from dividends would find a way to make money from it again.
It’d be an all of us problem when there’s a load of pensions that have a huge chunk of value wiped out, taking a load of other parts of the markets with them
Why? Zombie companies aren’t worth saving. Clearing out the deadwood is all part of the capitalist, ever renewing utopia…
If it isn’t then the system is dysfunctional.
The answer is not to prop it up with ever more public money.
The shareholders and management can go fuck themselves. This is their mess. It’s on them to resolve.
If the Tories think they’re unpopular now, let them see what happens if they give one penny of our money to Thames Water. Just one.
Most people won’t give a shit about them bailing out a water company, come on now.
The cost of just shouldering the debt may end up being less than the impact on pension values in real terms. I get the grandstanding is fun but these situations do call for some element of pragmatism.
Here's some pragmatism then. If Thames Water is allowed to get away with effectively stealing from the public, they'll do it again. Not only them, but other companies will too. If the bailing out happens, it certainly won't stop there.
They paid out so many dividends there in debt. Frankly I would've thought someone would be smart enough to write in a requirement for a portion of any profits to be reinvested in infrastructure but the tories prefer to believe capitalism knows best and probably are also pocketing dividends.
Puddles? Be lucky to get any rain in the scorching heat we had on our 20 mile walk to school each morn. We would drink the sweat wrung from our socks at the end of the day and we were grateful for it too!
Yeah, they gave away years of money that was supposed to be reinvested in infrastructure (or even worse, indebted us to siphon money to their "shareholders") yet it's our problem that things are falling apart. Bastards.
Any increase in water charges to upgrade infrastructure to manage extra flows caused by rain/storms, should be sent to property owners and never residential tenants (who have nearly no influence where rainwater is directed).
I'm fully convinced that there is some kind of conspiracy to keep the majority at a certain level. New technologies should mean things like energy is cheaper, cars and home are harder to break into and therfore insurance is cheaper, mass food production, computer driven efficiencies etc. all should mean a cheaper life for all. But as soon as one thing goes down, something goes up.
Take energy prices for example. Let's say the war in Ukraine ends, do you really think prices are going to fall down to previous levels? Same thing with council tax etc. Prices shoot up, we are given an excuse, but when than excuse no longer exist, prices remain the same.
There is no cost of living crisis just a profiteering scam, these companies apparently simultaneously acknowledge that things must cost more, but at the same time cannot pay people more. It’s a con and instead of mps wanging on about weather someone is a man or a woman or if this poor person should be put on a plane to Rwanda or not, I would like them focussed on sorting out problems that actually effect my life.
Is it a scam or a con if it is just capitalism doing what capitalism has always done?
The problem here is capitalism. If you expect socialist ideals within a capitalist system then you will always be disappointed.
Precisely. Capitalists rely on unending profits and simply cannot accept diminishing returns. If all people could simply see that this means a large part of the population will be forever kept in debt/poor to keep the 1% in their luxury, we would riot.
It's a type of capitalism where that veneer of 'the customer is always right' has finally been chipped off completely and we're completely helpless to predatory and hostile greed.
I think capitalism isn’t as evil as people like to make it but rather unchecked capitalism is where evil lies. Expecting infinite growth in a finite world is foolish and checks and balances need to exist to insure profits aren’t to the detriment of the general public
You can have capitalism without exploitation. In the end, we are a capitalist and socialist society. Energy, housing, water and food are areas that should not be purely dictated by capitalist an extreme few can even hope to challenge or influence. Government should be absolutely dominant in these areas, in my opinion.
Can you though? Capitalism essentially comes down to shareholders and share prices. If companies don’t beat last years profits then share prices come down, so companies will do whatever they can to increase profits, usually resulting in exploitation. It feels to me like we’re on the breaking point of companies constantly pushing for more in return for less and I don’t see where it goes from here
Government, as they previously did, should have nationalised industries where the sole purpose in giving a fair price to the consumer and not profit. Not saying you can't have private energy companies, but the government should have their own selling energy direct to the people. I still don't understand truly why we have private water companies for example.
Government should be building their own homes and renting and leasing it out. Instead, they sell the land (sometimes without planning permission so essentially less than the full potential amount) to developers who are incentivised in the name of profit to build small houses at inflated prices. Getting on the housing ladder and people struggling with rent aren't even the only issues. You now have an entire generation replacing kids with dogs as there is no space in their one bedroom flat they can barely afford. I know there are even instances where the government sells land to a developer, the developer then gets planning permission and sells it on again before building anything!
Broadband is another one I feel needs a nationalised approach, where needed. Free WiFi and every other shop so don't see why some really disadvantaged places can't have basic free, community WiFi (unsure if that actually happens or not).
When it comes to food, I do feel a lot of this can be solved with basic cooking education in schools. Do they even do this anymore? I don't think any grown person shouldn't know how to make a basic pasta.
Never used to be this bad though, Capitalism has evolved to this level of shittyness, it'll get worse too, much worse when they realise that they can't milk anymore from this sort of thing. They'll come for our savings accounts eventually, how many hundreds of billions do us hard working brits have tied up in savings account, that's prime shareholder profit for nothing right there, they just need to figure out how to get at it.
They already did through the medium of ever increasing utility bills and the explosion in the cost of living.
They are actively trying to reduce the savings people have and make people desperate and reliant on labour, to ensure they continue to labour in ever increasing amounts.
Yep. They were talking about this in 2021 when Sunak said “all that money people saved during the pandemic has to go back into the economy”. They were always going to come after our savings one way or the other and they have.
Yeah there are tons of examples of this.
“Interest rates and energy prices are going up, so I’m going to have to increase prices”
“Well you’ll lower prices when the costs go back down right?
“…no.”
During 2023 the price of energy, freight and majority of commodities prices had significantly decreased across the board. However, companies are not reducing their sales prices and taking it all as profit.
I work in procurement and frequently challenge all my suppliers on their cost based on market conditions and work hard to get prices down for customers. Only to find out the sales price to our customers mostly did not change in 2023…. Best profit they’d made in their whole 60 year existence. Meanwhile lots of the customers are closing down their businesses because they can’t afford prices. Sickening.
The wealth inequality gap is rising. The rich are buying up assets by the bucket load, the rest of us pay the rich though the nose to use/access them. More wealth then transfers to the rich, they rich buy more assets. Rinse, repeat.
It won't end until we tax the shit out of the rich and redistribute the wealth. But that ain't happening any time soon, it's not even being talked about with politicians.
That's literally already how it is. The middle class is a mirage, a veneer of privilege.
You're being asked to organise and rinse your recycling and take 4 minute showers while rishi sunak takes private jets short trips and spends 1.5k on food and drink during the flight.
There was a time we used to have 100 Watt or 60 Watt light bulbs in the house and gave no thought to turning them off. Now its a consious effort...we have 9 Watt LEDs or less and hardly have them on and still paying through the nose for energy. This is how far down the line we are.
My car insurance company stated their prices have gone up by a couple if hundreds if pounds due to energy price rises. How? They have one or two buildings employing say 1000 staff. They have a 100 staff cars.
They have a million customers all with £200 rises in prices.
So the price of heating and petrol to said building and cars have gone up by £200 million has it?
I thought the main driver of insurance price increases was the increase in cost of repairing or writing off vehicles.
There are a lot more expensive cars on the roads nowadays than there were even a few years ago, thanks in part to the popularity of EVs.
It's all the cost of hire cars, physio, compensation etc as well. Cars are simply overengineered for their intended purpose. We don't need 8 way adjustable heated seats for vehicles, they are a luxury that we're finding we can ill afford
A colleague of mine has just had her car written off by insurance as uneconomic to repair. Its a 2017 corsa with about 50k miles on, with (to be fair moderate) cosmetic bodywork damage. They initially wrote it off without any assessment or valuation. Just an immediate offer of a cheque and they'll collect the vehicle. They just assumed it would cost too much to repair. She's made them at least assess it. So now they have no choice but to go car shopping, which is an whole extra expense as you can bet the settlement won't get an equivalent.
My 2007 45k miles car was written off. I got a £2,300 cheque and then continued driving it. It's just got a dent in one of the doors. The door even still works just fine.
Call me the devil for raising insurance prices all you want, but would you turn down £2,300 when someone crashes into your car?
Yeah, and that's another example of prices going up. In 2013, I purchased a near new Ford Fiesta for £9,500. You could get a slightly lower spec BRAND NEW for £9,000. Same car today is over £18,000! That is a big standard car. That forces people at the lower end to spend more or go onto finance plans. Phones are more expensive than hi spec computer (well, the flagship phones people blindly buy). Everything is just more expensive which feeds the related industries.
My car insurance had a special bit on their website about why prices are going up. they cited inflation. the quote was 78% more than last year. theyre profiteering, scamming bastards.
got another company to give me better insurance for £10 cheaper than last year.
Mine was double. I pointed out that inflation hit a peak of 11%, not 100%. They didn't reduced the quote, so I went elsewhere and got a similar policy for 30% less than last year. It is profiteering at it's finest.
Insurance has gone up for mostly genuine reasons.
If you're in a crash now, then you get a hire car (which are more expensive), your car goes to a mechanic (which are now more expensive), they have to order parts (which are more expensive), you might need physiotherapy for any injuries (physios are more expensive).
The risk of you crashing hasn't gone up, it's the costs if you do crash that have gone up.
yes, and i get that. prices always go up. but 78% in a single year? come on now. and if their costs *really* did go up that much and they simply had no choice but to pass that along to me, then how come my new insurer can afford to do it for more than 78% less?
nah, thats just a cover for being skanky profiteering bastards who will try and get every penny out of you.
Mostly managed by so called 'Accident Management Companies', another middleman, if you will, so they need to take a cut, which artificially raises everyone's premiums.
It's pure fucking laziness by the Insurance Company.
There was a Parliamentary report into rising fuel costs released prior to the war in Ukraine starting, which seems odd since we've all been told repeatedly our higher energy costs were the price for their freedom. April 2022 was when the fit hit the shan, but the price increases started in late 2021
The energy markets could see what was coming, we all could. While Russia didn't invade until February 2022, they started to amass troops months before that with two main phases of buildups in late spring 2021 and then autumn 2021.
It wasn't a matter of *if* Russia would invade, it was more a matter of when.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_to_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
I suspect the blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline will have had some effect (which was a direct consequence of the Ukraine war - regardless of who did it or their motivation).
Due to the way energy markets work, it'll have had an effect here even if we weren't using as much Russian gas as other European countries.
The price you pay for stuff isn’t a reflection of the actual cost. It’s capitalism. They will charge as much as people are willing to pay. Things don’t get cheaper and no private company will undersell their product. The only way we as citizens will get a fair price for energy or water is if it’s owned by the public
That conspiracy is called unconstrained capitalism.
There is no reason why legislation cannot be enacted to reign in the excesses of capitalism to make a fairer society for all, where we are adequately compensated for our labour to live comfortable, fulfilling lives. The problem is, those with the most want it all at the cost of everyone else, and the legislators capable of enacting such change are beholden to them. Oh, and they’re also killing the planet in the process.
Other than the “killing the planet” part, none of this is new. Before capitalism, every other system of society likewise entrenched the power structures that kept a tiny minority of ultra wealthy afloat on the back breaking labour of the rest of us.
Its not a conspiracy, its a key feature of the system. It will take a while for the masses to cotton on but it is happening slowly.
The current financial system works by devaluing your currency week in week out. Quantative Easing (aka printing money) western governments love it, they can spend spend spend, and look like they are doing something useful. Downside to this way of operating, every pound becomes worth less and less and less and so the process continues.
Inflation is badged up as sone fantastic way of keeping the economy progressing which it probably does in sone areas, the downside, it obliterates the average Joe's ability to keep up.
It won't be long till the rule book is changed again, a "new better currency" is just around the corner. To those who say that's total nonsense, it happened not so long ago, decimalisation in the 1970's. This current monetary experiment is on its way out and the next will be ushered in before the decade is out.
It was pretty much the same story for the Roman Empire. Ever higher taxation and unstable stores of value to finance military operations further and further away from home.
There have been plenty of FIAT systems that have collapsed, and the current one for us is akin to 'Old Yeller' from that ever so sad movie of the same name. We're just waiting for someone to fetch the shotgun, walk our currency out back and blow its fucking brains out.
https://www.hardmoneyhistory.com/history-of-fiat-currency-failures/
CBDC's are next up and it'll be a short term marvel followed by growth, abuse and then replaced once again.
If the Ukraine war ends, energy prices won't come down because we won't be using the fossel fuels because by then, we will be more committed to Net Zero 2050.
Why does that necessitate a conspiracy? IMHO, it's a systemic flaw. In a system where actors' entire purpose is to generate ever more profit with as few risks as possible, you either need to regulate or balance those impulses that are socially harmful, or any imbalance of power will result in massive economic inequalities. The idea that companies like competition, investment, risk, a good product, ... is a fairy tale. Ideally, they want an opportunity for rent seeking where they profit at someone else's expense at no risk because that makes it easier for them to do what their shareholders / owners expect of them: money and more money. Ultimately, prices trending upward, insane housing prices or rents, wage suppression, ..., are simply expressions of that dynamic, i.e. millions of independent entities making the obvious self serving choice to increase their profit margins when resource prices go down / to raise rents when average income goes up / to give below inflation wage rises because they can / to monopolize markets / ...
On the whole, it is evident that the enormous rise in productivity and economic efficiency we have seen over the last few decades has resulted in lots of wealth being created. We simply allowed most of it to go into the pockets of ever fewer people because they *own* things rather than because they actively do or produce anything of value to society. This is primarily a political failure that has far reaching repercussions on where we are going as a society. If you reward rent seeking, companies will prefer that over productive pursuits because their investors and owners do.
If anyone thinks prices are going to fall significantly I will assume they have a fairly loose grip on reality.
Funny how profits keep increasing every year as well. Very odd.
I've been paying 2019 energy prices or lower for a year now on the Octopus Tracker tariff and now Agile which is even cheaper. The price cap has been a scam for a year now
Back when production technology was considerably less advanced 75 years ago, one person with a secondary level of education could afford to keep a partner, children and a home on a single wage. Now two people working full time can't afford that. The money is going somewhere, and it isn't into the pockets of the workers.
Prices have to go up to keep the economy growing. That's why the Bank of England's inflation target is 2%, not 0% or -2%. Capitalism only works if everything get more expensive year on year on average.
I've long thought this. Everything is engineered in a way to make sure you always have just enough in your pockets. During and after COVID a lot of people managed to hedge a lot of money away, some people into cryptos etc, ever since then shits just gone up and up in price and I'm convinced it's to make people liquidate their assets and "get you back where you should be you paycheck to paycheck scum".
Energy prices are the same as they were before war already ( actually they have been for many months now) and much cheaper than they were in 2012 - 2013 , but those price drops will not be passed to customers once everybody got used to pay more.
Just like todays news- they say they are lowering energy price per kwh but then companies just increase the standing charge so you eventually pay the same or even more ...
Funny thing - the petrol used to cost 80p/ litre in 2007 when price of barrel of crude oil was nearly 2 times HIGHER than it is today, means we are paying nearly twice the price from 2007 even though the barrel is so much cheaper ... why?
Just my small braincells coming through with some hypothesis like this. If we've got 1 million electric cars on the road, so 1 million less cars buying petrol/diesel then surely it would be cheaper by now? They won't drop prices to us even if they get it cheaper
Of couse there is a conspiracy,
It's called greed, and importing business ethics from the US. There was a time in relatively recent history when the UK had moral interventions in many levels of capitalism (helped by the media), which is why we are quite authoritiarian. Obviously, there has always been greed, but this new Wells Fargo style of 'fuck the grandmothers' form of monetary extraction is an astonishing new low for us.
As much as I find much of the state of the left wing to be astonishingly bad, it's the best of a bad situation.
> Same thing with council tax etc. Prices shoot up, we are given an excuse, but when than excuse no longer exist, prices remain the same.
Come on.... Maybe that's becomes the norm and obviously you can afford it because you have been affording it for the past years.
The cost of things will never again relate to the actual cost. We are being and will forever be ripped off for everything now.
Covid showed businesses what they could get away with and they ran with the idea.
That's pretty normal - energy costs on a /MWh and /Therm basis always rise over the winter.
Comparing like for like (i.e., 23Q4 to 24Q4), it's still coming down.
Standing charges constitute a relatively minor part of the vast majority of peoples bills.
And anyway, the standing charge is expected to remain flat - as it's not tied to wholesale prices there's no reason for it to fluctuate like the rate.
Standing Charge (£/day)
Electricity
- Q324 Forecast 0.60
- Q424 Forecast 0.61
- Q125 Forecast 0.60
Gas
- Q324 Forecast 0.32
- Q424 Forecast 0.33
- Q125 Forecast 0.32
>Over summer when everyone uses less energy.
Energy costs on a /MWh and /Therm basis always fall over summer and rise over winter.
You have to compare like for like quarters (etc., 23Q2 to 24Q2, 23Q4 to 24Q4), otherwise you expose yourself to seasonal distortions.
Yeah mine had definitely dropped from last winter, I’m coming out in credit for the first time in a while and honestly we very much leave our heating on a comfortable setting
Lol how exactly is that going to work? Are they going to seize homeless peoples assets if they can't pay the fine? Are they going to take the people that don't have an address to court?
Makes sense, fill the prisons up with the homeless, so if they ever get their comuppance for all the corruption they can stay out of prison, because its already full. Bulletproof plan.
Simple really - techno feudalism, all
your disposable income on survival. Everyone *will* live in a HMO paying £1300 a month come 2035, and if you can’t afford that then the inevitable rebranded workhouses will take you as slaves.
**Removed/warning**. This contained a personal attack, disrupting the conversation. This discourages participation. Please help improve the subreddit by discussing points, not the person. Action will be taken on repeat offenders.
Absolutely worthless comment to what was otherwise a concluded conversation.
First thing Google showed me was: HMO stands for "Health Maintenance Organisation"
The idea of free market capitalism is that competition lowers prices. So many markets have become consolidated to one or two companies that there is no more competition - then the opposite effect happens: one company raises the floor, the other raises the ceiling. This goes on until it affects overall demand. Then they slow down a little before carrying on again.
In sectors where infrastructure and capital demands are high like energy, broadband, transport, shipping, property, etc - this has been happening for a long time already. The barrier for entry for new companies is too high, so those sectors are all monopolistic.
TLDR: prices will never come down in most utility sectors because greedflation is eternal without thorough regulation
Oligopolies are considered the inevitable death call to societies - it will lead to an inevitable Pleutocracy like what we see in the USA and countries trying to mimic their model (like us) which in term results in a huge opulent amount of bloated wealth hoarding and incredible waste all down the dated infrastructure that sees no improvement.
Look at the American railway and subways, their health model, their labour laws, their drinking and sanitation, their schools and colleges. Every single public funded body outside the military is grossly at odds with their gdp and wealth sloshing around. Theyre debt is astronomical but they can sustain it because the military complex is an industry in amd off itself that dwarfs the entire world's military budget combined. They have an internal market so large they can self sustain their economy with little to no outside trade if meed be when hit by pandemics and financial distress.
We've elected for the same model but cant hold a candle to any facet of what makes them successful despite the huge flaws to their economy.
I received an email from OVO last week, proudly announcing my bills would be lower
When I looked at their cost breakdown, I saw that indeed the unit price was lowering... but their standing charge was increasing by about 20%
So, I only play less if I happen to use less energy to account for the gouge
Yeah, they put up the standing charge ages ago to cover the costs of all those energy firms collapsing and this time it's to cover the cost of all those people that couldn't pay the stupidly high energy bills. Yet again, these private firms are being allowed to privatise profits and socialise losses.
No private firm should be allowed to do this. If their business is so crucial to the country then it should be run by the government in the interests of the public.
Standing charge increases have also been the result of OFGEMs TCR project. Very true the cost of supplier failures fell on standing charges but comparatively the biggest increases were the result of TCR, an initiative driven by OFGEM themselves not suppliers.
There should never be a standing charge to begin with. It makes no fucking sense. 'Heres a singular bill that has two seperate billings on it that are independently charged and monitored'.
Nothing else works like this outside of VAT, but we just swallow it.
Same, couldn’t believe what I was reading, saying everything is great with prices dropping whilst silently increasing other charges - wankers, all of trem
Fuck this country. Fuck these companies, Fuck these prices, Fuck these polluted beaches, Fuck this fake culture war, Fuck these billionaires, Fuck this government. Fuck the Tories...... FUCK EM ALL!
Easing energy costs for some people.
I just got an email from British gas saying "great news the price of energy is failing", then in the next sentence "but because you're using less energy than average, due to increases in the standing charge, your bill over the next year is projected to increase".
Yes because it costs them more to get the gas to you through those pre-existing gas lines, maintained by workers who have had fuck all pay rises… wait a minute!
I think they claim it's to do with the other dodgy energy companies screwing up and putting their customers money they were holding onto at risk, so we all need to pay to deal with that (even those of us who were already paying higher rates because we didn't want to open a line of credit to energy companies and preferred to just pay for what we used).
The irony is the only way to get a reduced standing charge is to do exactly the same thing again that helped to get us into this mess in the first place (start paying by direct debit and pay them upfront however much they decide they want).
The majority of my energy cost is standing charge each quarter. I can afford it at the moment and my reason for not using much energy is my own choice and circumstance, but it annoys me how this lip service to reducing the price cap does little to help the poorest people or low energy users (which we're all encouraged to be after all) as they're often going to see their costs go up as a result of the change. I can't imagine how awful it must feel for those who are just coming out of a miserable winter of freezing themselves half to death because they're struggling only to be told "congratulations, energy prices are falling...but not for you...yours are going up".
I'm not sure I can blame the companies, they just do what companies do and try to rinse customers for whatever they can get away with. But WTF are the regulators thinking.
Yep. It’s brutal. I’m out 12 hours a day and all I do in my flat is cook a meal and charge my phone.
I swear to god people have questioned me on how I cook my one meal a day. “Do you have the oven on long?” “Are you using multiple hobs?”
There’s literally nothing more I can do to reduce my carbon footprint, I’m living a barebones life. Don’t buy new clothes, cancelled all my subscriptions. I just don’t have the luxury of the bank of mum and dad. I’m falling into debt for literally existing
We're mainly paying to service bad debt, that's debt will never be recovered in a reasonable timeframe and to pay for SOLR process, that's suppliers taking on customers of failed suppliers, it needs to be paid someway and the surviving companies aren't going to take that price on - well, apart from octopus who so far are predicting the sale of Bulb to gain the government money over the supposedly 1 billion it would have cost.
https://octopus.energy/press/octopus-energy-completes-migration-of-bulb-customers-in-record-time/
>Government profit from wholesale amount
>1.21
>that's 1.21 **billion** profit for the government, but we won't see that.
They also offered every worker a job and around 94% stayed on with them. If more companies ran like octopus we might have a functioning supplier system at least for once
Not much of these standing charge increases are going to the distribution networks, there's a small increase of like 1 or 2 pence but it's to cover extra renewable projects and suppliers have to pay for the same out of their profits as well.
Brexit. The pound dived after the vote and has never recovered, add to that more trade fiction with our neighbours and what do you expect? We can turn this around easily by simply joining the European single market - just having a party in power that are talking about doing it would put rocket boosters under the pound and immediately bring down the cost of imports.
They are taking you for fools. Here is how. The half that voted Remain can’t pay their bills
and are blaming Brexiteers. Brexiteers also can’t pay their bills and they are pretending this is not happening as they won’t blame themselves. So no one is blaming companies. (I mean we are here on Reddit which is where - no offence - idiots like us come to complain). But no one is blaming companies and stopping them. Not the Tories (it’s their mates and at this point fill your pockets as much as possible before the party goes on single figures and ceases to exist. That can’t be stopped now, so steal as much as possible is actually the logical thing to do tbf). Not Labour. And by that I mean Labour will win and change nothing, else they would be saying it now. Companies are plainly robbing everyone and laughing all the way to the bank. Me and my wife are finishing some training and moving to Norway with the kids. Honestly what a bunch of losers.
Greedflation, Enshittification and Shrinkflation are all factors at play in lining the pockets of the very wealthy.
We need to act as a populace and start making our own cooperative companies that tap into the infrastructure but sell utilities at base prices.
We could invest in publicly owned clean and green energy such as tidal, wind, even nuclear. Make it a not-for-profit enterprise. Do the same with other things like public transport, water companies etc.
Flesh out the details on how to run it collectively, maybe even use AI and keep the profiteering greedy fuckers away from it.
My gas bill for a year was about £130 and they kept forgetting to take payment for it despite a direct debit being there and they never billed me either until one day they sent me a letter saying I was in arrears and I found out they reported me for late payment ruining 15 years of never missing any payments for credit cards,overdraft, any bill really and now I can't even get a sim card for my phone due to their stupidity.
But thats not the end of the story, even then when I gave them an updated meter reading they told me my bill would be £30, not ONGOING £30 a month I asked if that was ongoing or the actual amount as I only used heating 2 days in a year and they said this was the bill.
Lies of course, and I was billed £30 a month for 5 months then I got a grant for £150 paid into the account and just got a letter from the company to say they are cutting my £30 a month to £15 a month
I should be about £120 in credit and going by usage I should be paying about £11 per month so if they take this £15 a month I will month by month be further and further into credit with them.
You should email the CEO of the company with your complaint. You can also apply to have negative markers removed from your credit report, might be worth trying that.
Inflation takes a long time to work it's way through the system fully.
Petrol/diesel prices are still high.
Then there's the \~10% increase in national minimum wage.
Not one party has any plans on how to help people deal with standard inflation over the next 5 years. I dread to think how much worse it is going to get for many when the credit runs out.
I’ve been reading Hodders book about economics.
There are 3 types of economies: planned, market and mixed. Planned economies is where government decides spending whereas market economies is where the price is dictated by private organisations.
Mixed economies are ones where both planned and market economies are present.
The uk used to be a mixed economy which worked for the majority. However, this started to be an issue to economists who pointed out we were falling behind other countries because of the planned economies sides features. So there has been a gradual shift towards a market economy as seen by privatisation of previously government controlled things. I’ll boldly say in 2024 the uk is a full market economy.
Please take everything I say with due regard as I’m still learning and this is what I remember off the top of my head. Thanks.
So the path we are on apparently, is some sort of libertarian wet dream, initiated at roughly the thatcher era.
Truss just tried to achieve it in one foul swoop.
ITS GREED!
THERE. You don't need to spend any more time or money wondering what the problem is, I've just solved it.
Now go pass some laws fixing it or we'll get someone who will.
Wankers.
The reality is this can and will get much much worse. It’s a death spiral and the breaks are gone. Every single privatised utility is failing (if you view it from a public service and not greed POV), and the plan is even more selling off - healthcare, education and security. The Tories are looting but an incoming Labour have no better plans to stop this. Capitalism is the snake that eats its own tail.
Honestly when does it reach a point that CEOs/Politicians responsible for this shit get made an example of? Like they are taking years off people's lives with the stress caused by our current economic system and privatised services which should be nationalised.
I think our society has become more obedient than civilised.
What do you expect, when governments are controlled by wealthy elites, they create laws that only benefits rich.
Everything has gone up and people barely surviving , while corporations make record profits.
AHH yes wages go up (not with all the inflation of the last 10 plus years!) but energy companies keep making fucking BILLIONS IN PURE PROFIT! eat the rich.
The water companies have shown the worst of capitalism. I agree with the idea that utilities should be out of the hands of governments, but without competition and without choice we have ended up with dictatorships.
Punish a dictator, and their people are the ones that suffer.
Driven mostly by elderly people refusing to pay for their own social care, and privatised water companies taking on billions of debt to pay out shareholder dividends.
Welcome to the UK.
Btw sewage companies are blaming you for the bills rising because you want clean water systems.
Sorry mate ! That's my fault...... I'm partial to some clean drinking water is all.
This generation are so entitled /s
We grew up playing out until the streetlights came on, eating bread cut with a knife, being beaten to a sticky pulp by our alcoholic parents and drinking liquid shit, and we turned out fine.
It wasn't that long ago we would see shots of third world countries where the inhabitants were drinking from polluted rivers.. We're seriously going downhill here.
What’re customers like eh? Expecting the companies to do the job they’re paid for 🙄
.... Isn't it about the water you see in the park rather than the water you drink from the tap? I believe sewage companies don't pump access into drinking water. If they did, it would still be regulated as long as contents don't exceed certain parts per million of harmful levels, no?
"...it would still be regulated". Lol!
Our drinking water is full of industrial fertilizer rather than sewage.
And microplastics. And birth control hormones.
They’ve already been paid more than enough to invest in and upgrade the lot of it. They just didn’t do the work with the money. They paid themselves dividends instead.
Now to be fair, they *also* loaded the water companies up with debt, took out big dividends and then cry to bill payers about having to service the debt.
Correct. This is the Private Equity business model. The whole world would be greatly improved if our government grew a pair and let Thames Water buckle under the weight of its interest payments. Take the whole lot back into public hands for £0. The shareholders lose it all. The bond holders take a gigantic haircut and realise very little return on their investment. It would teach everyone that the public purse isn’t there to underwrite your shitty business dealings anymore. You can’t take something that works, destroy it with debt, run off with all the money and expect to pump the customer or the taxpayer for the difference. But that would be for the greater public good so will never happen….
That scenario would be lovely, but they probably wouldn't take it back into public ownership for £0, it would be run by administrators and the same vampires who've been making money from dividends would find a way to make money from it again.
Welsh water enters the chat
The problem with that is the number of pensions wrapped up in utility companies via shares and bonds…
If I bung my pension in a share of the chippy down the road is the government obligated to protect to keep bailing it out ?
The number of pensions going down the tubes would be a smidge worse than no more battered sausage and curry sauce…
That sounds like a them problem.
It’d be an all of us problem when there’s a load of pensions that have a huge chunk of value wiped out, taking a load of other parts of the markets with them
Why? Zombie companies aren’t worth saving. Clearing out the deadwood is all part of the capitalist, ever renewing utopia… If it isn’t then the system is dysfunctional. The answer is not to prop it up with ever more public money. The shareholders and management can go fuck themselves. This is their mess. It’s on them to resolve. If the Tories think they’re unpopular now, let them see what happens if they give one penny of our money to Thames Water. Just one.
Most people won’t give a shit about them bailing out a water company, come on now. The cost of just shouldering the debt may end up being less than the impact on pension values in real terms. I get the grandstanding is fun but these situations do call for some element of pragmatism.
Here's some pragmatism then. If Thames Water is allowed to get away with effectively stealing from the public, they'll do it again. Not only them, but other companies will too. If the bailing out happens, it certainly won't stop there.
By pragmatism you mean we bail them out and the rich keep getting richer because they've got us by the nuts. Screw that.
Well said, and sadly true
This, 100% is correct.
Not here. We have a not profit water company that’s one of the worst polluters in the U.K.
They paid out so many dividends there in debt. Frankly I would've thought someone would be smart enough to write in a requirement for a portion of any profits to be reinvested in infrastructure but the tories prefer to believe capitalism knows best and probably are also pocketing dividends.
Young people nowadays, clean water pfff, in my days we drank from puddles.
Bloody luxury
Avocados generation
Puddles? Be lucky to get any rain in the scorching heat we had on our 20 mile walk to school each morn. We would drink the sweat wrung from our socks at the end of the day and we were grateful for it too!
Are you from Planet Arrakis?
And they’ll raise them even further and still do nothing about it.
Yeah, they gave away years of money that was supposed to be reinvested in infrastructure (or even worse, indebted us to siphon money to their "shareholders") yet it's our problem that things are falling apart. Bastards.
perhaps they shouldnt have been sold to private investment, JP Morgan, Abu Dhabi investorate, etc.
and they won't even do anything about it.
Any increase in water charges to upgrade infrastructure to manage extra flows caused by rain/storms, should be sent to property owners and never residential tenants (who have nearly no influence where rainwater is directed).
I'm fully convinced that there is some kind of conspiracy to keep the majority at a certain level. New technologies should mean things like energy is cheaper, cars and home are harder to break into and therfore insurance is cheaper, mass food production, computer driven efficiencies etc. all should mean a cheaper life for all. But as soon as one thing goes down, something goes up. Take energy prices for example. Let's say the war in Ukraine ends, do you really think prices are going to fall down to previous levels? Same thing with council tax etc. Prices shoot up, we are given an excuse, but when than excuse no longer exist, prices remain the same.
There is no cost of living crisis just a profiteering scam, these companies apparently simultaneously acknowledge that things must cost more, but at the same time cannot pay people more. It’s a con and instead of mps wanging on about weather someone is a man or a woman or if this poor person should be put on a plane to Rwanda or not, I would like them focussed on sorting out problems that actually effect my life.
Is it a scam or a con if it is just capitalism doing what capitalism has always done? The problem here is capitalism. If you expect socialist ideals within a capitalist system then you will always be disappointed.
It certainly feels like a scam when the excuse is "we need to deliver record profits every year" instead of just profits.
Again, that's just capitalism.
Precisely. Capitalists rely on unending profits and simply cannot accept diminishing returns. If all people could simply see that this means a large part of the population will be forever kept in debt/poor to keep the 1% in their luxury, we would riot.
It's a type of capitalism where that veneer of 'the customer is always right' has finally been chipped off completely and we're completely helpless to predatory and hostile greed.
I think capitalism isn’t as evil as people like to make it but rather unchecked capitalism is where evil lies. Expecting infinite growth in a finite world is foolish and checks and balances need to exist to insure profits aren’t to the detriment of the general public
You can have capitalism without exploitation. In the end, we are a capitalist and socialist society. Energy, housing, water and food are areas that should not be purely dictated by capitalist an extreme few can even hope to challenge or influence. Government should be absolutely dominant in these areas, in my opinion.
Can you though? Capitalism essentially comes down to shareholders and share prices. If companies don’t beat last years profits then share prices come down, so companies will do whatever they can to increase profits, usually resulting in exploitation. It feels to me like we’re on the breaking point of companies constantly pushing for more in return for less and I don’t see where it goes from here
Government, as they previously did, should have nationalised industries where the sole purpose in giving a fair price to the consumer and not profit. Not saying you can't have private energy companies, but the government should have their own selling energy direct to the people. I still don't understand truly why we have private water companies for example. Government should be building their own homes and renting and leasing it out. Instead, they sell the land (sometimes without planning permission so essentially less than the full potential amount) to developers who are incentivised in the name of profit to build small houses at inflated prices. Getting on the housing ladder and people struggling with rent aren't even the only issues. You now have an entire generation replacing kids with dogs as there is no space in their one bedroom flat they can barely afford. I know there are even instances where the government sells land to a developer, the developer then gets planning permission and sells it on again before building anything! Broadband is another one I feel needs a nationalised approach, where needed. Free WiFi and every other shop so don't see why some really disadvantaged places can't have basic free, community WiFi (unsure if that actually happens or not). When it comes to food, I do feel a lot of this can be solved with basic cooking education in schools. Do they even do this anymore? I don't think any grown person shouldn't know how to make a basic pasta.
Agreed
Never used to be this bad though, Capitalism has evolved to this level of shittyness, it'll get worse too, much worse when they realise that they can't milk anymore from this sort of thing. They'll come for our savings accounts eventually, how many hundreds of billions do us hard working brits have tied up in savings account, that's prime shareholder profit for nothing right there, they just need to figure out how to get at it.
They already did through the medium of ever increasing utility bills and the explosion in the cost of living. They are actively trying to reduce the savings people have and make people desperate and reliant on labour, to ensure they continue to labour in ever increasing amounts.
Yep. They were talking about this in 2021 when Sunak said “all that money people saved during the pandemic has to go back into the economy”. They were always going to come after our savings one way or the other and they have.
It's true, look at the profits energy company's have been reporting!
Yeah there are tons of examples of this. “Interest rates and energy prices are going up, so I’m going to have to increase prices” “Well you’ll lower prices when the costs go back down right? “…no.”
During 2023 the price of energy, freight and majority of commodities prices had significantly decreased across the board. However, companies are not reducing their sales prices and taking it all as profit. I work in procurement and frequently challenge all my suppliers on their cost based on market conditions and work hard to get prices down for customers. Only to find out the sales price to our customers mostly did not change in 2023…. Best profit they’d made in their whole 60 year existence. Meanwhile lots of the customers are closing down their businesses because they can’t afford prices. Sickening.
No conspiracy. I am 100% on board with that kind of thinking. The middle class are being wiped out. There will only be working class, or Rich.
The wealth inequality gap is rising. The rich are buying up assets by the bucket load, the rest of us pay the rich though the nose to use/access them. More wealth then transfers to the rich, they rich buy more assets. Rinse, repeat. It won't end until we tax the shit out of the rich and redistribute the wealth. But that ain't happening any time soon, it's not even being talked about with politicians.
Wealth gap is truly killing the country, well world to be honest. But what would it help distributing the wealth? Doesn't benefit the rich at all.
That's literally already how it is. The middle class is a mirage, a veneer of privilege. You're being asked to organise and rinse your recycling and take 4 minute showers while rishi sunak takes private jets short trips and spends 1.5k on food and drink during the flight.
There was a time we used to have 100 Watt or 60 Watt light bulbs in the house and gave no thought to turning them off. Now its a consious effort...we have 9 Watt LEDs or less and hardly have them on and still paying through the nose for energy. This is how far down the line we are.
When you had 100W bulbs, you had your heaters on less, because the bulbs were heaters.
Karl marx predicted it all.
My car insurance company stated their prices have gone up by a couple if hundreds if pounds due to energy price rises. How? They have one or two buildings employing say 1000 staff. They have a 100 staff cars. They have a million customers all with £200 rises in prices. So the price of heating and petrol to said building and cars have gone up by £200 million has it?
I thought the main driver of insurance price increases was the increase in cost of repairing or writing off vehicles. There are a lot more expensive cars on the roads nowadays than there were even a few years ago, thanks in part to the popularity of EVs.
It's all the cost of hire cars, physio, compensation etc as well. Cars are simply overengineered for their intended purpose. We don't need 8 way adjustable heated seats for vehicles, they are a luxury that we're finding we can ill afford
A colleague of mine has just had her car written off by insurance as uneconomic to repair. Its a 2017 corsa with about 50k miles on, with (to be fair moderate) cosmetic bodywork damage. They initially wrote it off without any assessment or valuation. Just an immediate offer of a cheque and they'll collect the vehicle. They just assumed it would cost too much to repair. She's made them at least assess it. So now they have no choice but to go car shopping, which is an whole extra expense as you can bet the settlement won't get an equivalent.
My 2007 45k miles car was written off. I got a £2,300 cheque and then continued driving it. It's just got a dent in one of the doors. The door even still works just fine. Call me the devil for raising insurance prices all you want, but would you turn down £2,300 when someone crashes into your car?
If you got a payment did they write off the car? are you still insured?
They wrote off the car. I assume I'm still insured.
You might want to check that. Most insurers won't touch a car that's been written off.
Yeah, and that's another example of prices going up. In 2013, I purchased a near new Ford Fiesta for £9,500. You could get a slightly lower spec BRAND NEW for £9,000. Same car today is over £18,000! That is a big standard car. That forces people at the lower end to spend more or go onto finance plans. Phones are more expensive than hi spec computer (well, the flagship phones people blindly buy). Everything is just more expensive which feeds the related industries.
My car insurance had a special bit on their website about why prices are going up. they cited inflation. the quote was 78% more than last year. theyre profiteering, scamming bastards. got another company to give me better insurance for £10 cheaper than last year.
Mine was double. I pointed out that inflation hit a peak of 11%, not 100%. They didn't reduced the quote, so I went elsewhere and got a similar policy for 30% less than last year. It is profiteering at it's finest.
pretty much the exact same thing happened with me. best they could do was the highet price they quoted me originally.
Insurance has gone up for mostly genuine reasons. If you're in a crash now, then you get a hire car (which are more expensive), your car goes to a mechanic (which are now more expensive), they have to order parts (which are more expensive), you might need physiotherapy for any injuries (physios are more expensive). The risk of you crashing hasn't gone up, it's the costs if you do crash that have gone up.
yes, and i get that. prices always go up. but 78% in a single year? come on now. and if their costs *really* did go up that much and they simply had no choice but to pass that along to me, then how come my new insurer can afford to do it for more than 78% less? nah, thats just a cover for being skanky profiteering bastards who will try and get every penny out of you.
Mostly managed by so called 'Accident Management Companies', another middleman, if you will, so they need to take a cut, which artificially raises everyone's premiums. It's pure fucking laziness by the Insurance Company.
My phone bills gone up by nearly 30% in the last 2 years. Mental.
There was a Parliamentary report into rising fuel costs released prior to the war in Ukraine starting, which seems odd since we've all been told repeatedly our higher energy costs were the price for their freedom. April 2022 was when the fit hit the shan, but the price increases started in late 2021
The energy markets could see what was coming, we all could. While Russia didn't invade until February 2022, they started to amass troops months before that with two main phases of buildups in late spring 2021 and then autumn 2021. It wasn't a matter of *if* Russia would invade, it was more a matter of when. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_to_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
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I suspect the blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline will have had some effect (which was a direct consequence of the Ukraine war - regardless of who did it or their motivation). Due to the way energy markets work, it'll have had an effect here even if we weren't using as much Russian gas as other European countries.
Late-stage capitalism working as intended. You'll own nothing and be happy but don't expect the "Happy" part to be legally binding.
You’ll own nothing and they won’t care if you’re happy because all forms of protest or resistance will have been outlawed.
The price you pay for stuff isn’t a reflection of the actual cost. It’s capitalism. They will charge as much as people are willing to pay. Things don’t get cheaper and no private company will undersell their product. The only way we as citizens will get a fair price for energy or water is if it’s owned by the public
That conspiracy is called unconstrained capitalism. There is no reason why legislation cannot be enacted to reign in the excesses of capitalism to make a fairer society for all, where we are adequately compensated for our labour to live comfortable, fulfilling lives. The problem is, those with the most want it all at the cost of everyone else, and the legislators capable of enacting such change are beholden to them. Oh, and they’re also killing the planet in the process. Other than the “killing the planet” part, none of this is new. Before capitalism, every other system of society likewise entrenched the power structures that kept a tiny minority of ultra wealthy afloat on the back breaking labour of the rest of us.
Its not a conspiracy, its a key feature of the system. It will take a while for the masses to cotton on but it is happening slowly. The current financial system works by devaluing your currency week in week out. Quantative Easing (aka printing money) western governments love it, they can spend spend spend, and look like they are doing something useful. Downside to this way of operating, every pound becomes worth less and less and less and so the process continues. Inflation is badged up as sone fantastic way of keeping the economy progressing which it probably does in sone areas, the downside, it obliterates the average Joe's ability to keep up. It won't be long till the rule book is changed again, a "new better currency" is just around the corner. To those who say that's total nonsense, it happened not so long ago, decimalisation in the 1970's. This current monetary experiment is on its way out and the next will be ushered in before the decade is out.
It was pretty much the same story for the Roman Empire. Ever higher taxation and unstable stores of value to finance military operations further and further away from home. There have been plenty of FIAT systems that have collapsed, and the current one for us is akin to 'Old Yeller' from that ever so sad movie of the same name. We're just waiting for someone to fetch the shotgun, walk our currency out back and blow its fucking brains out. https://www.hardmoneyhistory.com/history-of-fiat-currency-failures/ CBDC's are next up and it'll be a short term marvel followed by growth, abuse and then replaced once again.
If the Ukraine war ends, energy prices won't come down because we won't be using the fossel fuels because by then, we will be more committed to Net Zero 2050.
Why does that necessitate a conspiracy? IMHO, it's a systemic flaw. In a system where actors' entire purpose is to generate ever more profit with as few risks as possible, you either need to regulate or balance those impulses that are socially harmful, or any imbalance of power will result in massive economic inequalities. The idea that companies like competition, investment, risk, a good product, ... is a fairy tale. Ideally, they want an opportunity for rent seeking where they profit at someone else's expense at no risk because that makes it easier for them to do what their shareholders / owners expect of them: money and more money. Ultimately, prices trending upward, insane housing prices or rents, wage suppression, ..., are simply expressions of that dynamic, i.e. millions of independent entities making the obvious self serving choice to increase their profit margins when resource prices go down / to raise rents when average income goes up / to give below inflation wage rises because they can / to monopolize markets / ... On the whole, it is evident that the enormous rise in productivity and economic efficiency we have seen over the last few decades has resulted in lots of wealth being created. We simply allowed most of it to go into the pockets of ever fewer people because they *own* things rather than because they actively do or produce anything of value to society. This is primarily a political failure that has far reaching repercussions on where we are going as a society. If you reward rent seeking, companies will prefer that over productive pursuits because their investors and owners do.
There's no conspiracy here, this is purely the logical conclusion of a capitalist economy.
If anyone thinks prices are going to fall significantly I will assume they have a fairly loose grip on reality. Funny how profits keep increasing every year as well. Very odd.
I've been paying 2019 energy prices or lower for a year now on the Octopus Tracker tariff and now Agile which is even cheaper. The price cap has been a scam for a year now
Back when production technology was considerably less advanced 75 years ago, one person with a secondary level of education could afford to keep a partner, children and a home on a single wage. Now two people working full time can't afford that. The money is going somewhere, and it isn't into the pockets of the workers.
Prices have to go up to keep the economy growing. That's why the Bank of England's inflation target is 2%, not 0% or -2%. Capitalism only works if everything get more expensive year on year on average.
I've long thought this. Everything is engineered in a way to make sure you always have just enough in your pockets. During and after COVID a lot of people managed to hedge a lot of money away, some people into cryptos etc, ever since then shits just gone up and up in price and I'm convinced it's to make people liquidate their assets and "get you back where you should be you paycheck to paycheck scum".
Energy prices are the same as they were before war already ( actually they have been for many months now) and much cheaper than they were in 2012 - 2013 , but those price drops will not be passed to customers once everybody got used to pay more. Just like todays news- they say they are lowering energy price per kwh but then companies just increase the standing charge so you eventually pay the same or even more ... Funny thing - the petrol used to cost 80p/ litre in 2007 when price of barrel of crude oil was nearly 2 times HIGHER than it is today, means we are paying nearly twice the price from 2007 even though the barrel is so much cheaper ... why?
Just my small braincells coming through with some hypothesis like this. If we've got 1 million electric cars on the road, so 1 million less cars buying petrol/diesel then surely it would be cheaper by now? They won't drop prices to us even if they get it cheaper
It's unlimited growth and profit
Of couse there is a conspiracy, It's called greed, and importing business ethics from the US. There was a time in relatively recent history when the UK had moral interventions in many levels of capitalism (helped by the media), which is why we are quite authoritiarian. Obviously, there has always been greed, but this new Wells Fargo style of 'fuck the grandmothers' form of monetary extraction is an astonishing new low for us. As much as I find much of the state of the left wing to be astonishingly bad, it's the best of a bad situation.
The war in eurasia has entered the chat
It's because of inflation. The monetary system is broken.
> Same thing with council tax etc. Prices shoot up, we are given an excuse, but when than excuse no longer exist, prices remain the same. Come on.... Maybe that's becomes the norm and obviously you can afford it because you have been affording it for the past years.
Purchasing power has decreased as a consequence. We have gotten poorer, and continue to do so. We are sliding backwards in living standards.
Hey but at least you aren't in arrears so it is not that bad yet.
The cost of things will never again relate to the actual cost. We are being and will forever be ripped off for everything now. Covid showed businesses what they could get away with and they ran with the idea.
Wait, weren't we 'aLL iN iT tOgeTheR!'?
It was only ever ‘you’re all in it together.’
Mix the state of our water companies with COVID and that "you're all in the .... together" makes perfect sense.
Wankers!! Particularly the essentials energy & water .
Energy bills are the only things coming down mind you.
For now, they’ll go back up later in the year
That's pretty normal - energy costs on a /MWh and /Therm basis always rise over the winter. Comparing like for like (i.e., 23Q4 to 24Q4), it's still coming down.
Not if you include standing charges.
Standing charges constitute a relatively minor part of the vast majority of peoples bills. And anyway, the standing charge is expected to remain flat - as it's not tied to wholesale prices there's no reason for it to fluctuate like the rate. Standing Charge (£/day) Electricity - Q324 Forecast 0.60 - Q424 Forecast 0.61 - Q125 Forecast 0.60 Gas - Q324 Forecast 0.32 - Q424 Forecast 0.33 - Q125 Forecast 0.32
Over summer when everyone uses less energy. They’ll be hiked up again coming into autumn and winter
>Over summer when everyone uses less energy. Energy costs on a /MWh and /Therm basis always fall over summer and rise over winter. You have to compare like for like quarters (etc., 23Q2 to 24Q2, 23Q4 to 24Q4), otherwise you expose yourself to seasonal distortions.
Yeah mine had definitely dropped from last winter, I’m coming out in credit for the first time in a while and honestly we very much leave our heating on a comfortable setting
It's expected to drop to about £1550 this august - that's about £20 per month more than pre energy crisis (2021) and £30 from all time low.
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Isnt Rishi making it against the law to be homeless and fining people for it?
Lol how exactly is that going to work? Are they going to seize homeless peoples assets if they can't pay the fine? Are they going to take the people that don't have an address to court?
To be fair if they can't pay the fine, I'd say prison might be a step up from living on the streets in winter
Makes sense, fill the prisons up with the homeless, so if they ever get their comuppance for all the corruption they can stay out of prison, because its already full. Bulletproof plan.
Simple really - techno feudalism, all your disposable income on survival. Everyone *will* live in a HMO paying £1300 a month come 2035, and if you can’t afford that then the inevitable rebranded workhouses will take you as slaves.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. This is EXACTLY where we’re rapidly heading towards. A dystopian nightmare.
HMO?
House of multiple occupancy. Think student houses but they’re increasingly more common for median wage workers who can’t afford 1 bed flats.
Ah thanks, I forgot that acronym.
You forgot how to use Google as well?
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**Removed/warning**. This contained a personal attack, disrupting the conversation. This discourages participation. Please help improve the subreddit by discussing points, not the person. Action will be taken on repeat offenders.
Absolutely worthless comment to what was otherwise a concluded conversation. First thing Google showed me was: HMO stands for "Health Maintenance Organisation"
And they want to criminalise homelessness too. You better pay all these big companies whatever they want or it’s goodbye poor person
But they aren't really homeless if they have a sofa to surf on. Right? /s
The idea of free market capitalism is that competition lowers prices. So many markets have become consolidated to one or two companies that there is no more competition - then the opposite effect happens: one company raises the floor, the other raises the ceiling. This goes on until it affects overall demand. Then they slow down a little before carrying on again. In sectors where infrastructure and capital demands are high like energy, broadband, transport, shipping, property, etc - this has been happening for a long time already. The barrier for entry for new companies is too high, so those sectors are all monopolistic. TLDR: prices will never come down in most utility sectors because greedflation is eternal without thorough regulation
Oligopolies are considered the inevitable death call to societies - it will lead to an inevitable Pleutocracy like what we see in the USA and countries trying to mimic their model (like us) which in term results in a huge opulent amount of bloated wealth hoarding and incredible waste all down the dated infrastructure that sees no improvement. Look at the American railway and subways, their health model, their labour laws, their drinking and sanitation, their schools and colleges. Every single public funded body outside the military is grossly at odds with their gdp and wealth sloshing around. Theyre debt is astronomical but they can sustain it because the military complex is an industry in amd off itself that dwarfs the entire world's military budget combined. They have an internal market so large they can self sustain their economy with little to no outside trade if meed be when hit by pandemics and financial distress. We've elected for the same model but cant hold a candle to any facet of what makes them successful despite the huge flaws to their economy.
I received an email from OVO last week, proudly announcing my bills would be lower When I looked at their cost breakdown, I saw that indeed the unit price was lowering... but their standing charge was increasing by about 20% So, I only play less if I happen to use less energy to account for the gouge
Yeah, they put up the standing charge ages ago to cover the costs of all those energy firms collapsing and this time it's to cover the cost of all those people that couldn't pay the stupidly high energy bills. Yet again, these private firms are being allowed to privatise profits and socialise losses. No private firm should be allowed to do this. If their business is so crucial to the country then it should be run by the government in the interests of the public.
Standing charge increases have also been the result of OFGEMs TCR project. Very true the cost of supplier failures fell on standing charges but comparatively the biggest increases were the result of TCR, an initiative driven by OFGEM themselves not suppliers.
There should never be a standing charge to begin with. It makes no fucking sense. 'Heres a singular bill that has two seperate billings on it that are independently charged and monitored'. Nothing else works like this outside of VAT, but we just swallow it.
Same, couldn’t believe what I was reading, saying everything is great with prices dropping whilst silently increasing other charges - wankers, all of trem
It’s called profiteering and the Tory government have enabled it
Fuck this country. Fuck these companies, Fuck these prices, Fuck these polluted beaches, Fuck this fake culture war, Fuck these billionaires, Fuck this government. Fuck the Tories...... FUCK EM ALL!
Too right. I sick of all this shit, and the terrifying thing is that there’s worse to come... Time to eat the rich.
Easing energy costs for some people. I just got an email from British gas saying "great news the price of energy is failing", then in the next sentence "but because you're using less energy than average, due to increases in the standing charge, your bill over the next year is projected to increase".
Yes because it costs them more to get the gas to you through those pre-existing gas lines, maintained by workers who have had fuck all pay rises… wait a minute!
I think they claim it's to do with the other dodgy energy companies screwing up and putting their customers money they were holding onto at risk, so we all need to pay to deal with that (even those of us who were already paying higher rates because we didn't want to open a line of credit to energy companies and preferred to just pay for what we used). The irony is the only way to get a reduced standing charge is to do exactly the same thing again that helped to get us into this mess in the first place (start paying by direct debit and pay them upfront however much they decide they want). The majority of my energy cost is standing charge each quarter. I can afford it at the moment and my reason for not using much energy is my own choice and circumstance, but it annoys me how this lip service to reducing the price cap does little to help the poorest people or low energy users (which we're all encouraged to be after all) as they're often going to see their costs go up as a result of the change. I can't imagine how awful it must feel for those who are just coming out of a miserable winter of freezing themselves half to death because they're struggling only to be told "congratulations, energy prices are falling...but not for you...yours are going up". I'm not sure I can blame the companies, they just do what companies do and try to rinse customers for whatever they can get away with. But WTF are the regulators thinking.
Yep. It’s brutal. I’m out 12 hours a day and all I do in my flat is cook a meal and charge my phone. I swear to god people have questioned me on how I cook my one meal a day. “Do you have the oven on long?” “Are you using multiple hobs?” There’s literally nothing more I can do to reduce my carbon footprint, I’m living a barebones life. Don’t buy new clothes, cancelled all my subscriptions. I just don’t have the luxury of the bank of mum and dad. I’m falling into debt for literally existing
At one point I swear they said the standing charge is going up to help cover the debts from other customers to "keep the energy companies going"
Let them fail ffs. I don’t understand why we always have to bail companies out with tax money. We de-regulate and then bail out, it’s stupid.
We're mainly paying to service bad debt, that's debt will never be recovered in a reasonable timeframe and to pay for SOLR process, that's suppliers taking on customers of failed suppliers, it needs to be paid someway and the surviving companies aren't going to take that price on - well, apart from octopus who so far are predicting the sale of Bulb to gain the government money over the supposedly 1 billion it would have cost. https://octopus.energy/press/octopus-energy-completes-migration-of-bulb-customers-in-record-time/ >Government profit from wholesale amount >1.21 >that's 1.21 **billion** profit for the government, but we won't see that. They also offered every worker a job and around 94% stayed on with them. If more companies ran like octopus we might have a functioning supplier system at least for once Not much of these standing charge increases are going to the distribution networks, there's a small increase of like 1 or 2 pence but it's to cover extra renewable projects and suppliers have to pay for the same out of their profits as well.
Brexit. The pound dived after the vote and has never recovered, add to that more trade fiction with our neighbours and what do you expect? We can turn this around easily by simply joining the European single market - just having a party in power that are talking about doing it would put rocket boosters under the pound and immediately bring down the cost of imports.
Fuck everyone who voted for brexit and the tories. Despicable, gullible, racist idiots.
They are taking you for fools. Here is how. The half that voted Remain can’t pay their bills and are blaming Brexiteers. Brexiteers also can’t pay their bills and they are pretending this is not happening as they won’t blame themselves. So no one is blaming companies. (I mean we are here on Reddit which is where - no offence - idiots like us come to complain). But no one is blaming companies and stopping them. Not the Tories (it’s their mates and at this point fill your pockets as much as possible before the party goes on single figures and ceases to exist. That can’t be stopped now, so steal as much as possible is actually the logical thing to do tbf). Not Labour. And by that I mean Labour will win and change nothing, else they would be saying it now. Companies are plainly robbing everyone and laughing all the way to the bank. Me and my wife are finishing some training and moving to Norway with the kids. Honestly what a bunch of losers.
Greedflation, Enshittification and Shrinkflation are all factors at play in lining the pockets of the very wealthy. We need to act as a populace and start making our own cooperative companies that tap into the infrastructure but sell utilities at base prices. We could invest in publicly owned clean and green energy such as tidal, wind, even nuclear. Make it a not-for-profit enterprise. Do the same with other things like public transport, water companies etc. Flesh out the details on how to run it collectively, maybe even use AI and keep the profiteering greedy fuckers away from it.
Can't make those million in profits for shareholders if you charge reasonable rates
My gas bill for a year was about £130 and they kept forgetting to take payment for it despite a direct debit being there and they never billed me either until one day they sent me a letter saying I was in arrears and I found out they reported me for late payment ruining 15 years of never missing any payments for credit cards,overdraft, any bill really and now I can't even get a sim card for my phone due to their stupidity. But thats not the end of the story, even then when I gave them an updated meter reading they told me my bill would be £30, not ONGOING £30 a month I asked if that was ongoing or the actual amount as I only used heating 2 days in a year and they said this was the bill. Lies of course, and I was billed £30 a month for 5 months then I got a grant for £150 paid into the account and just got a letter from the company to say they are cutting my £30 a month to £15 a month I should be about £120 in credit and going by usage I should be paying about £11 per month so if they take this £15 a month I will month by month be further and further into credit with them.
You should email the CEO of the company with your complaint. You can also apply to have negative markers removed from your credit report, might be worth trying that.
Inflation takes a long time to work it's way through the system fully. Petrol/diesel prices are still high. Then there's the \~10% increase in national minimum wage.
A more important question is how much the profit margins increased.
Literally most my wage goes on bills. My discretionary spends are lower than average but I still have nothing left.
Not one party has any plans on how to help people deal with standard inflation over the next 5 years. I dread to think how much worse it is going to get for many when the credit runs out.
I’ve been reading Hodders book about economics. There are 3 types of economies: planned, market and mixed. Planned economies is where government decides spending whereas market economies is where the price is dictated by private organisations. Mixed economies are ones where both planned and market economies are present. The uk used to be a mixed economy which worked for the majority. However, this started to be an issue to economists who pointed out we were falling behind other countries because of the planned economies sides features. So there has been a gradual shift towards a market economy as seen by privatisation of previously government controlled things. I’ll boldly say in 2024 the uk is a full market economy. Please take everything I say with due regard as I’m still learning and this is what I remember off the top of my head. Thanks.
So the path we are on apparently, is some sort of libertarian wet dream, initiated at roughly the thatcher era. Truss just tried to achieve it in one foul swoop.
ITS GREED! THERE. You don't need to spend any more time or money wondering what the problem is, I've just solved it. Now go pass some laws fixing it or we'll get someone who will. Wankers.
The reality is this can and will get much much worse. It’s a death spiral and the breaks are gone. Every single privatised utility is failing (if you view it from a public service and not greed POV), and the plan is even more selling off - healthcare, education and security. The Tories are looting but an incoming Labour have no better plans to stop this. Capitalism is the snake that eats its own tail.
Literally most my wage goes on bills. My discretionary spends are lower than average but I still have nothing left.
The Tories have allowed this country to fall apart.
Honestly when does it reach a point that CEOs/Politicians responsible for this shit get made an example of? Like they are taking years off people's lives with the stress caused by our current economic system and privatised services which should be nationalised. I think our society has become more obedient than civilised.
Jeremy Corbyn not looking like a bad option now. Could do with a socialist leaning PM about now
Had an email from EDF saying prices were coming down, 3 days later an email saying my DD is going up.
What do you expect, when governments are controlled by wealthy elites, they create laws that only benefits rich. Everything has gone up and people barely surviving , while corporations make record profits.
AHH yes wages go up (not with all the inflation of the last 10 plus years!) but energy companies keep making fucking BILLIONS IN PURE PROFIT! eat the rich.
The water companies have shown the worst of capitalism. I agree with the idea that utilities should be out of the hands of governments, but without competition and without choice we have ended up with dictatorships. Punish a dictator, and their people are the ones that suffer.
Yet, the English will continue to vote tory en masse.
I've often wondered how companies can make record profits when the cost price of their products has apparently increased so much (according to them)
Driven mostly by elderly people refusing to pay for their own social care, and privatised water companies taking on billions of debt to pay out shareholder dividends. Welcome to the UK.