Bills hit £1,723 as energy secretary claims she’s powerless over war
Ofgem's 4% price cap rise pushes bills to £1,723 as the energy secretary calls the war 'impossible to control', Britain has levers it isn't pulling.
Ofgem confirmed on Wednesday that the energy price cap will rise 4% from 1 October, adding £60 a year to the typical household bill and taking it to £1,723, a three-year high. Asked about it the same day, Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh told broadcasters: “I can’t control wars in the Middle East that we weren’t a part of, which impact families here.”
That sentence is doing a lot of work. It asks the public to accept that a bill rising for the third time in a year is simply weather, something that happens to Britain rather than something Britain has any part in. The households who will find £1,723 leaving their accounts this winter are entitled to ask whether that is actually true.
How the war got into the bill
Wholesale gas prices are the official reason for the rise, and Ofgem is not wrong that they are volatile. Gas bills alone are going up 8% this round, driven by the Gulf conflict that began when the United States struck Iran on 28 February. But “we weren’t a part of it” does not hold up against the record of the past six months. Within days of the strikes, the then Starmer government granted the US military use of British bases, including Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford, for operations connected to the war. RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, initially left out of that permission, was hit by an Iranian or Hezbollah-linked drone on 2 March that came within 800 yards of British personnel; Iran also fired two ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia. Britain was not a neutral party watching a war on the news. It was hosting it.
That distinction is why ten trade union general secretaries, representing 2.3 million workers across Unison, the NEU, the RMT, PCS and others, wrote to Andy Burnham on 11 August demanding he revoke US access to those bases. Their letter put the two crises in one sentence: households have paid £221 more a year in energy since the war began, and the same government that controls the bases is the one telling the public it has no control at all. Burnham became prime minister on 20 July, inheriting both the war and the bill crisis from Starmer’s resignation. He has not answered the unions’ letter with a change of policy.
The profits that predate the war
Even setting the war aside, the “nothing we can do” line struggles against the industry’s own numbers. Energy companies have paid out £70.7bn in shareholder dividends since 2010, according to research group Common Wealth, and the sector posted roughly £30bn in pre-tax profit in 2024 alone, a margin of 23%, three times the average across the wider economy. Those figures were already high before a single Iranian missile was fired. Ofgem’s cap limits what suppliers can charge per unit; it does not touch what the wider sector has already banked.
That is the gap Fahnbulleh’s framing skips over: the war explains why wholesale prices spiked, but not why the industry sitting on record margins hasn’t been asked to absorb more of the shock, nor why a chancellor facing a 71% public majority for energy nationalisation, according to YouGov polling that now spans every party’s voters including nearly half of Conservatives, has left the ownership question untouched.
What Westminster could do instead
The TUC has put a concrete alternative on the table: an emergency social tariff, funded by raising the surcharge on bank profits rather than on billpayers. The case is not abstract. The big four banks made £13.8bn in profit in the first quarter of 2026 alone, on top of £45.7bn the year before, and paid out £25bn in City bonuses in the year to March. The TUC estimates a higher windfall levy could raise up to £60bn over four years, enough to fund a social tariff saving typical households up to £559 a year. The government has taken one step in this direction already, removing VAT from domestic electricity bills, which the End Fuel Poverty Coalition estimates has shaved about £45 off the typical bill. It is real money, and it is nowhere near enough to offset a £60 rise landing on top of a 13% increase from the summer.
The gap between what has been done and what unions and campaigners say is possible is the whole argument against “powerless”. National Energy Action’s Adam Scorer put the coming months plainly: heading into winter with prices spiking again, he said, suppliers need to “listen and respond to their customers who are really struggling.” Simon Francis of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition goes further: “the Ofgem price cap may limit the unit rates and standing charges that consumers pay, but sadly it doesn’t cap the number of people suffering due to rising energy costs.” Fuel Poverty Action’s Jonathan Bean describes households “choosing between heating their homes and feeding themselves or their children.”
The honest limits of the argument
None of this means Britain alone can bring down the wholesale gas price. Global shipping-lane risk through the Hormuz Strait and Gulf-wide supply fears are being driven by multiple states, not by UK policy, and revoking base access tomorrow would not on its own reprice the futures market. Ministers can also point to the VAT cut as evidence they have already acted, and to public ownership as a change too slow to help anyone this winter. Those are fair points, and a serious case for British agency has to hold them rather than skip past them.
But “we can’t control the war” and “we can’t do anything about the bill” are two different claims, and the government has let them blur into one. The war is not a UK policy lever; the bases the US used to fight it are. The wholesale price is not a UK policy lever; the 23% margins and £70.7bn in dividends sitting inside the energy sector are. A £60bn bank windfall tax is not a foreign policy question at all.
Who pays, who doesn’t
Roughly 22 million households face this rise; about 11 million on fixed tariffs are shielded for now, and some five million already spend more than a fifth of their income keeping the lights on. One in ten Britons has already skipped a hot meal to save on energy, according to the Big Issue’s reporting on the fuel poverty figures. On the other side of that ledger sit the banks that pocketed £13.8bn in three months and the energy firms that have taken £70.7bn since 2010. Ofgem’s next review lands in January. Nothing in the record suggests the government plans to touch the bases, the windfall tax or public ownership before then. The bill, meanwhile, is due on the first of October.
