“Suppliers will get paid twice as much for doing exactly the same as they were doing before”

• NATASHA Cox is right to point out how many Islington households will be forced into fuel poverty when the energy price cap is raised in April, unless help is provided urgently (Help to fight fuel poverty, January 14).

A quirk of the energy market, though, is that as families and businesses suffer, the gas companies will be making enormous profits out of their pain.

Prices are shooting up because demand for gas has increased globally, as businesses get back to business, but there’s only so much gas and suppliers can’t easily turn up a tap to get more out, so prices just go up and up.

But it doesn’t cost any more to extract or supply the stuff, so the suppliers will just get paid twice as much for doing exactly the same as they were doing before.

Governments have applied “windfall” taxes on this sort of unexpected profit in the past and should do so again, to provide essential support to the country’s lower-income households.

The gas companies may claim such a tax is unfair but the Green Party’s call for one is simply a reasonable demand for common decency.

ANDREW MYER
Islington Green Party