Households pay £221 for war fought from UK bases
A war Britain helped wage from its own air bases has added £221 to household energy bills, and this week's growth figures show the strain.
British households are paying £221 a year more for energy because of a war on Iran that UK air bases helped fight, and new figures on UK growth Iran war energy prices confirm the strain.
UK growth slowed to 0.4% in the second quarter of 2026, down from 0.6% in the first, the Office for National Statistics said on 13 August. ONS director Liz McKeown put it plainly: growth “remained relatively robust” but slowed after a strong start to the year. That is the establishment version of this story. The version that matters is the £221.
Who pays
The price cap rose 13% on 1 July, driven by wholesale gas costs from the Middle East conflict, pushing a typical dual-fuel bill from £1,641 to £1,862 a year. Gas alone is up nearly a quarter. Since April, the number of UK homes spending more than a fifth of their income on energy has climbed from 4.3 million to 5.5 million; 13.5 million now spend over a tenth.
“The legacy of the energy crisis is millions of households locked into debt they cannot repay, and that is pushing up bills for everyone,” said Adam Scorer, chief executive of National Energy Action, who called the July rise a “red energy warning.” Small manufacturers are exposed too: 68% already report being hit by the conflict, according to a British Chambers of Commerce survey of more than 800 firms.
How Britain got here
The US and Israel began joint strikes on Iran on 28 February. Within days, Keir Starmer’s government, then still in office, let American forces use RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia for strikes on Iranian missile sites, while insisting RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus was excluded from offensive use. Akrotiri was hit by a drone strike anyway, on 1 March, which Cyprus’s foreign minister blamed on an Iranian-made munition fired from Lebanon. Britain was not a bystander to this war. Its bases were part of the machinery that fought it.
Oil prices surged past $100 a barrel as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was severely disrupted, in what the International Energy Agency called the largest supply shock in the market’s history. UK households didn’t feel it immediately, because the price cap only resets each quarter. The bill for a war that began in February arrived in July.
Not every household is exposed yet. Four in ten customers sit on fixed tariffs, and KPMG’s Yael Selfin notes consumers have “weathered” the shocks of the year “remarkably well”, with June’s growth beating forecasts on World Cup and warm-weather spending. Oil has since eased after Trump ordered US forces to pause strikes in early August, but the cap is fixed until October, so any relief will not reach bills this quarter regardless of what happens next in the ceasefire talks.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s answer, a VAT cut on electricity from October, saves a typical household £45 a year, a fifth of what the July rise cost them. Even Burnham doesn’t pretend otherwise. “I can accept criticism that this isn’t enough, because I wouldn’t say it’s enough,” he told the BBC this week. Chancellor John Healey delivers his first budget on 28 October, with July’s CPI figures, due 19 August, expected to show inflation climbing further above June’s 2.6%. The war that Britain helped fight from its own bases is still being paid for at the meter, five months on and £176 short of covering it.
