If you have missed the news about Britain's cost of energy crisis it can only be because you have not been able to afford to charge your phone or turn on your laptop. Every time we in the NTI newsroom see a report the numbers get higher; talk is now of 'a second mortgage' for all of us Brits and an extra cool £100 billion in Government intervention to keep us warm this winter.
How might this situation affect us Insolvency Practitioners? The CBI have warned that viable businesses will be forced to the brink of collapse unless the Government provides urgent help to support companies and consumers through the energy crisis. We know that Liz and Rishi are on it, because they tell us constantly, but neither of them have mentioned the £100 billion number - surely that can't be because:
1 It just isn't possible to achieve, and
2 It would make them mighty unpopular
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has already predicted that taxes will need to rise by more than £40 billion a year by the middle of the decade to prevent Government debt from growing out of control. We suspect that many of their number are now in darkened rooms working out how much extra tax is required to add another £100 billion onto the top of that.
Philippe Commaret is EDF’s managing director and he spoke yesterday (Tuesday 23 August) in a pleasingly garlic accent about "a dramateeec and catastropheeec winter" for his customers (which is a pretty unique take on PR). He was joined by our friends from the CBI and Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), who said that with one in three employers expecting soaring energy bills to act as a barrier to growth, ministers must “explore all options for navigating the crisis”. The FSB said companies were already being forced to close their doors because of price rises.
Businesses do not enjoy access to the price cap and, unlike households, are yet to receive any help with soaring energy bills and this is certainly the case for landlords of pubs, three quarters of whom warned they face an “extinction-level event” this winter because of soaring energy costs. A poll earlier this week found two thirds of landlords have seen their utility bills more than double. A handful reported rises in their bills of more than 500 per cent. Of those surveyed, almost three in four said that they could not afford the increases (which is where we got the 'three-quarters' fraction from).
Gary, a usually chipper publican from Burnley said: “This is a doomsday scenario. Talking to fellow operators, they aren’t even being offered new energy contracts at any price due to the sector being deemed ‘high risk’. They can’t get power even if they can afford it. What a shambles. Half was it?"
Could this be Rishi's last roll of the dice in the campaign to become our next Prime Minister, as Boris prepares to pass the poison chalice from his little chubby hands? A promise to keep the pubs open over Christmas and add another £30 billion to the £40 billion and the £100 billion? Surely a little extra debt can't do that much harm?
How many of you out there have experience with running a Liquidation of a pub or two?
