Consumer champion Martin Lewis has condemned the government for acting like "zombies" over tackling the energy crisis plaguing the UK.
Appearing on ITV's Good Morning Britain, he warned that the country is facing a "national crisis on the scale of the pandemic". It comes after forecasters predicted that energy bills will skyrocket in October and a further increase in January and April.
He also called on the two Conservative leadership candidates to solidify a plan to alleviate the "mental health damage" that millions of Brits face amid the rising cost of living crisis.
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Mr Lewis said: "For every £100 direct debit you currently pay, in October you will be paying £181, and in January you will be paying £215, and that’s on top of the rises we had in April. That is a cataclysmic rise for households; millions of households will simply not be able to afford it.
“When we get to January, a typical bill will be £4,266 a year, many pensioner households pay more than that because they have the heating on more for understandable reasons. That is 45% of the full new state pension and a bigger proportion of the old state pension.
"We’re not talking mortgages. We’re not talking rent. We’re talking energy bills. This is absolutely catastrophic.
“And for a Government to sit there like zombies saying ‘We can’t do anything’, when you run an organisation, which I have done and many other people have done, when you know there is a crisis of magnificent proportions coming, you do not say ‘We’ll wait until we’ve got the change in our leadership’ – you start dealing with it now.”
He continued: "What we’re facing here is a financial emergency that risks lives. I accept the point that Boris Johnson is running a zombie government and can’t do much, but the two candidates – one of them will be our prime minister – they need to get together in the national interest to tell us the bare minimum of what they will do.
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“If they can’t agree, and what we need to hear now, because the mental health damage for millions of people who are panicked about this is manifest, is we need to hear accurate plans.
“We have some relative detail from Rishi Sunak saying he will look at the handouts he gave in May and increase them, but, unless he’s doubling them, and he needs to double them, it is not in proportion to what he did back in May.”
Speaking about Liz Truss’s proposed economic plans, he added: “I cannot believe the only proposal will be tax cuts, because many of the poorest, many state pensioners, many on Universal Credit, don’t pay tax so it will not help them and they simply cannot afford this £2,000-a-year or more year-on-year rise.
“And getting rid of the green levy, which is a sticking plaster on a gaping wound… The green levy is typically around £150 off bills, we’re talking about a rise of thousands of pounds on bills.”
Meanwhile, Octopus Energy founder Greg Jackson, said the government needs to do more to tackle the energy crisis which has "deepened. Appearing on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he claimed the government's relief package proposal is "clearly not sufficient now".
He also called on energy companies and the government to rally together and figure out a solution to solve the crisis. He added that there is "no company that can tackle this problem alone or indeed working just with other companies. It needs companies and governments to work together."
He continued: "I think, as I said, the last support package was really significant. It’s just that the crisis has deepened since then, and that’s why it needs revisiting.
"We just know that the level of increases is going to be unmanageable for so many without the right support from the Government and it’s beyond what any one company can do.”
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