Gordon Brown has called on Liz Truss to “show up” for the poorest workers who are facing unpayable energy bills, and warned that the UK was facing “a winter wave of unprecedented need”.
As the new prime minister prepared to unveil her emergency support package for people who will struggle to afford spiralling heating costs, Brown said “doing the right thing is a matter of political will”.
The former Labour premier wrote in an article for the Guardian that while charities and food banks had stepped in to help the most vulnerable, the “last lines of defence” had been breached. “Only the government has the resources to end the unspeakable suffering caused by unpayable bills and unmet needs,” he said.
Research has found that without help, 11.7 million households will be spending at least 25% of their income on fuel by January.
Without an energy price freeze, the paper from York University found, combined bills for fuel and food would take up 80% of the budget of households on universal credit or the minimum wage.
Brown said: “From Covid to conflicts, we have always relied on some of the lowest-income earners – caregivers, nurses, ambulance workers, our armed services – to show up in an emergency. Now it’s time for the government to show up for them.”
He wrote: “On Tuesday our new prime minister, Liz Truss, travelled the length of the country to Balmoral and back. There is despair in the communities she flew over but is unlikely to ever visit. There is fear in the eyes of people she and her ministers will never meet. For across our country there is suffering they do not see, hardship they do not hear and pain – and yet they pass on by.”
Brown praised the Labour leader Keir Starmer’s proposal to freeze the energy price cap at the level set in April.
Truss will unveil the much-anticipated details of her and her new chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s plan to help millions of people facing destitution caused by spiralling energy bills.
She has pinned the blame on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and vowed in her first prime minister’s questions on Wednesday to give people “certainty to make sure they are able to get through this winter”.
Truss ruled out a further windfall tax on oil and gas firms to pay for the plans, and she accused Labour of advocating “the same old tax and spend”.
