The circuit-breaker strategy

Minister tells energy suppliers to do more to help households tackle unpaid bills this winter

An energy minister has told the bosses of Great Britain’s biggest energy suppliers to do more to help households get on top of their unpaid energy bills this winter, before the government spends almost £2.5bn to help write off the country’s record high debts.

Energy bosses were summoned to a roundtable meeting on Thursday to discuss the government’s plan to pay down the energy debts of about 2.4m of the hardest-hit households.

The debt relief scheme is part of a wider “circuit-breaker” strategy put forward by the chancellor in the annual budget statement last month. This includes measures to tackle household energy debt, which could reach £7bn by the end of the year...

Suppliers are expected to proactively identify customers who may be under financial strain and offer help such as debt payment plans or pointing them in the direction of debt advice services.

The government is also planning to work with the industry to make it easier to spot households that may need extra help, and to modernise payment systems to make it easier to pay. The government has backed the use of smart meters and smart pre-pay meters to help households track their spending and avoid getting into arrears.


A "circuit-breaker strategy" is a remarkably unfortunate description of a government plan to help those in debt to energy suppliers. 

It sounds like a dollop of other people's money, debt payment plans, debt advice services and the old pre-payment meter idea. Something Ministers can point to when winter hardship stories pop up in the media. 

It's clearly aimed at defending Andrew Burnham's performance of  'The Decent Northern Bloke', but in practical terms does it all add up to a nothingburger? Without a reference to ditching Net Zero, it doesn't appear to offer much to anyone who isn't a Labour politician.

What is the collective noun for 10-year plans?

‘Two 10-year plans in 10 months’: Labour mocked as Burnham’s grand vision is watered down

Andy Burnham’s flagship 10-year plan for Britain is facing a significant scaling back before its publication, with the Prime Minister’s long-promised blueprint for transforming the country now expected to comprise a speech, a slimmed-down document and months of further consultation...

The uncertainty became a point of attack for the Conservatives at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. With Burnham in the Caribbean for a meeting of Commonwealth leaders, First Secretary of State Louise Haigh faced questions from Tory deputy leader Alex Burghart.

Burghart questioned Labour’s reliance on long-term strategies, comparing the new proposal with an earlier 10-year plan associated with the party.

“I’m old enough to remember Keir Starmer’s 10-year plan because it was six months ago,” he said. “This is the only political party in history to have two 10-year plans in 10 months.”

No matter, Mr Burnham is clearly planning to have a plan which isn't Mr Starmer's plan but another plan altogether, a different plan, a planned plan. 

Plus some speeches.


The vastness of a plan which includes both a history and a criticism of society, an analysis of its evils, and a discussion of its principles, authorizes me, I think, in giving to my work the title under which it now appears — The Human Comedy. Is this too ambitious? Is it not exact? That, when it is complete, the public must pronounce.

Honoré de Balzac – Paris, July 1842

I'm Lisa Nandy and I'm here to help

Lisa Nandy formally intervenes in Sky’s £1.6bn ITV takeover

The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has stepped in over Sky’s £1.6 billion deal to buy ITV’s media and entertainment arm, asking regulators to examine the takeover on public interest grounds.

Ms Nandy has announced her decision to issue a so-called Public Interest Intervention Notice, which paves the way for the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and regulator Ofcom to probe the takeover.

The two regulators will report back to her on the impact of the deal on media plurality in the UK and free speech by 27 January.

Once their reports arrive, she may then decide to refer the deal to the CMA for a further in-depth investigation.


The post title is of course taken from Ronald Reagan's famous joke from 1986 -

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.

An entertaining Christmas game perhaps - replace 'from the Government' with the name of any one of numerous politicians and political activists. Or even institutions such as the BBC. 

The aim of the game is to come up with the most chilling suggestion. 

We Need You Helpless

 

Labour's class war approach to business

Stephen Pollard has a useful CAPX piece on Labour's failure to venture beyond its traditional class war approach to business. 


Labour’s mangled sixth-form-level Marxist class war

• Labour MP Emma Reynolds told GB News she doesn't think employers are working people
• It's clear that, even as a Treasury minister at the heart of economic policy, she holds 19th century Marxist views about employers
• The misunderstanding of what business owners and landlords do, will discourage investors and lower available rental properties

Emma Reynolds, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is one of the more sensible Labour MPs. She resigned as a front bencher when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader and is firmly in the moderate wing of the Labour Party.

Which is why her comment yesterday that ‘I don’t think employers are working people’ is all the more revealing – and all the more telling about the attitude of the government. Plainly, my description of Reynolds as one of the more sensible Labour MPs is relative. When even someone as relatively sensible as Reynolds believes that employers are a class that don’t work for a living but somehow live off the backs of ‘working people’ then it shows the scale of Labour’s inability to grasp even the basics of wealth creation and growth – and thus the scale of the problem for our economy.


The whole piece is quite short and well worth reading as another reminder that Labour does not intend to base its voter appeal on an enlightened approach to small and medium-sized businesses.


Reynolds is no Marxist. But it’s damning of both her and Labour more generally that such a crude Marxist analysis of employers and employees drives their thinking, with no understanding of the nature of small and medium-sized businesses and how hard most employers work to create wealth and employment for their fellow working people. As one poster on social media put it: ‘It’s 7:41 on a Sunday, and I’m at my desk – guess I’m not a working person. My employees are not doing the same, I can tell you that (and I don’t expect or want them to!)’

Clumsy, vote-farming rhetoric

Burnham suggests cutting benefits would force people into crime

The Prime Minister has suggested that cutting benefits would force people to turn to crime.

Andy Burnham attacked the Conservatives’ plans to cut £36bn from welfare spending, arguing that it would heap pressure on the criminal justice system and the NHS.

Suppose we snip out some of the rhetoric.

heap pressure on the criminal justice system and the NHS.
the utter chaos that they cause in people’s lives
If you just go to brutal cuts
people in absolute crisis
they will be going into other services in a chaotic way.
If you come at it from a numbers game
you’ll throw people into crisis,
you’ll be spending money on people in A&E
and the police, [the] criminal justice system

Okay I'll admit that I quite like doing this. In spite of his 'decent northern bloke' shtick, Burnham is a crude purveyor of clumsy, vote-farming rhetoric.

Comfortable professionals making business for themselves

An interesting video on over-diagnosis of mental conditions. It highlights the much wider problem of comfortable professionals making business for themselves. 

Another diagnosis would be an unhealthy fascination with other people's money.