£200 heating oil allowance

Spoonie_Turtle

MattMattMattUK said:

Apodemus said:

propertyrental said:

Linsomer said:

Really?
I'm a pensioner on benefits and last November I ran out of oil.  No choice but to borrow money to pay out £460 up front for minimum permissable amount.  Without it no heating or hot water.  Still owe it. That's the reality for me and others like me living in rural communities 

I feel for you, I really do. But that's a reflection of your income generally and utility costs generally.

You'd have had the same financial difficulty if you had a gas boiler. The fact that you live in a rural area and use oil is not the problem.

While I agree that the overall income/expenditure issues are the real problem, to be fair to Linsomer, you don't need to pay a lump-sum up-front if you are heating by gas and the industry has procedures in place to make gas disconnection very much a last resort.  For people struggling to budget, oil becomes much more of a "feast or famine" issue. 

I think your last sentence identifies the real issue, struggling/failure to budget, if one has an annual energy usage of £2,400 and puts £200 aside for energy every month it does not matter if they have to pay for energy before or after usage, or indeed concurrently with usage then there is no issue. If one decides to only try to find the money when a bill comes in, be that when needing to buy oil, or on a quarterly or six month bill from an energy supplier is due for payment then one is much more likely to have financial problems.

That only works if the prices you've used to budget don't suddenly shoot up.  It's not necessarily an issue of 'we're paying more than other people for heating' because that's not the case, it's an issue of 'these costs have shot up (along with everything else) and caught us by surprise so we haven't had time to try to budget properly / simply can't afford the increase' - just like gas and electricity, so the perceived unfairness was if people using alternative fuels were left floundering.  Which some have been, since the scheme has taken so long to get off the ground.