‘SAP’ price falls again and Office for National Statistics says it has dropped by over half since peak – yet the Tories are still allowing corporations to gouge us
The latest official government figures on energy prices show a 17% fall in the gas ‘system average price’ (SAP) in just the last seven days – and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has confirmed that it fell by a massive 60% since its peak at the end of August:
The SAP is calculated by dividing the total spent by corporate gas purchasers on gas market trades or transactions by the total volume purchased.
So if the average price of gas continues to fall so dramatically, why is the government allowing corporations to continue to charge the eye-watering and rising prices that are forcing so many households into poverty, debt and despair and will cost lives this winter – prices that are now being accrued as debt thanks to Truss’s half-baked intervention to (only temporarily) cap prices – and why are ‘our’ media so acquiescent?
Even in the petrol market, notorious for being fast to increase prices and slow to drop them, falling wholesale prices eventually filter through to the forecourt pump and are falling now. Yet it is unheard of for the retail gas or electricity price to come down, so rises become ‘baked in’ even though the wholesale market can and clearly does go down.
Given the low prices being paid by consumers in other countries – and the much cheaper interventions by governments such as the French and German to nationalise their energy industries – analysts have criticised the UK’s current energy price situation as the biggest scam or robbery in history and one in which the UK government and the so-called opposition are inexcusable and willing accomplices.
They are right – and though you’d never get the ONS to say so publicly, privately it might agree.
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