Energy bills extra support ruled out by Chancellor

Households are improbable to get other enactment with vigor bills from April, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has said.

Energy bills for a emblematic household are acceptable to emergence from £2,500 to £3,000 a year.

The authorities has been nether unit to connection further assistance for radical to header with precocious state and energy costs.

Consumer concern adept Martin Lewis said that allowing the measure summation would beryllium a "national enactment of harm".

The government's vigor terms warrant reduces what households wage per portion of vigor they use.

From April, the emblematic household measure volition beryllium allowed to emergence to £3,000 per year. The strategy volition tally until April 2024.

A £400 discount applied to astir households' vigor bills from October is besides owed to extremity astatine the opening of April.

Some groups volition get other currency payments to assistance with vigor costs, including households connected means-tested benefits, pensioners, and immoderate radical connected disablement benefits.

Mr Lewis, laminitis of Moneysavingexpert, has written to the chancellor, informing him that would mean different 1.7m radical volition participate substance poorness - erstwhile radical cannot spend to adequately vigor their location - taking the full to 8.4m.

Mr Hunt told the BBC said that the Treasury kept each enactment "under review" but helium did not deliberation the authorities had the "headroom to marque a large caller inaugural to assistance people".

The National Audit Office precocious published a study saying the vigor terms warrant volition present outgo little than £40bn and this was a mode to assistance bring down ostentation and debar a recession.

Mr Hunt said: "We ever look astatine what other we tin do. But we besides person to beryllium liable with nationalist finances, due to the fact that if we're not, we'll conscionable spot involvement rates spell up, and radical volition look a antithetic benignant of cost, and that's wherefore we person to get that equilibrium right."