Energy prices will go up in April as planned, suggests Jeremy Hunt

ENERGY prices will go up in April as planned as there isn’t enough cash to keep on paying bills forever, Jeremy Hunt suggested yesterday.

The Chancellor slapped down calls to use billions of pounds of extra tax to cancel the planned 20 per cent hike in bills.

When grilled by The Sun, he said: “We don’t have that windfall.

"The fall in energy prices means the numbers are different to what they were two months ago, but even though the cost of the [scheme] has gone down, so too have the windfall taxes we were expecting to collect, to pay for them.”

The cap is set to rise from £2,500 a year for the average family to £3,000.

But energy prices are set to tumble in the months afterwards, analysis predict - prompting calls for Mr Hunt to step in to smooth the path.

It came as the chief of the Government’s new energy efficiency taskforce admitted it was still “too difficult” for Brits to go green.

NatWest boss Alison Rose told business leaders in London yesterday: “If you are a householder, who wants to make your home more energy efficient, right now, it’s too difficult.

"It’s too difficult to work out what steps you need to take to retrofit your home, find and access the funding you need to pay for it, and critically find the trusted skilled tradespeople to deliver the improvements that you want.”

But she insisted there were huge potential benefits to slash bills if they got it right.

Today ministers are warned that poor and middle class Brits still can’t afford to swap boilers for pricy eco heat pumps.

Just half of the cash on offer to get people to make the swap is on track to be spent, the Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee says.

A huge target of 600,000 installations a year is now incredibly unlikely to be met because people have no idea what swaps to make, and there is a huge shortage of engineers, they say.

Meanwhile, Ofgem’s CEO called on all suppliers to pay compensation to people who had been forced onto prepayment meters.

British Gas will face a watchdog probe over whether they treated Brits forced onto pre-payment meters fairly and took all steps to help them first.