The UK government caps energy bills and abandons the households off the grid.
I write this from a county where the heat arrives on a truck. Nobody in Friendship is on a gas line. We heat with propane, and with electricity off the Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative — the largest member-owned rural electric co-op in Wisconsin, headquartered a few miles from my shop — and when the crude market moves, the tank price moves with it. There is no cap on that tank. There never has been. The LP truck that came out last spring did not ask what I could afford. It delivered what the wholesale market said the gallons were worth that week. I paid it, and I have no quarrel with the driver or the co-op. My own tank costs more this winter than it did in March, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The story the BBC carried this week out of Minety, the Forest of Dean and Wotton-under-Edge is not a foreign story. It is this one, with a different accent.
Gas and electricity in Britain run on a regulated price cap. Heating oil runs on the raw global crude market, unregulated, and the people buying it — about a million and a half of them, the vast majority of them rural — are paying 111 pence per litre against roughly 60 before the war in Iran began in March. It peaked at 134. A 500-litre domestic tank now costs about £550 to fill against roughly £300 a year ago.
Note what the design says. Regulation follows customers. Where they are concentrated enough to matter, on the grid, in towns, there is a cap. Where they are dispersed — at the end of a lane in Wiltshire, off County Z in Adams County — there is the commodity price and a grant to stop using the commodity. That is not an accident of statute. It is a decision about who the state will hold a floor under, and the decision was made by counting heads.
Every government of the last twenty years has called rural communities the backbone of the country. This is the same government pricing their winter heat as a rounding error. Chapter 16 of We Too calls it the community-collapse contradiction — the rhetoric of community values running against the machinery that empties communities — and here it is in its plainest form: value us in the speech, discount us in the budget.
Peter Mason in Minety is retired. He is at the end of his tank. He needs £550 to fill it. Last year it was about £300, and he called it horrendous, and he said he would have to pull money out of savings because, in his words, he is retired and it is not like he can change jobs. That last clause is the whole of it. He is not making a lifestyle choice about energy. He is draining the account he thought would carry him to the end.
A man who worked forty years and retired into a house in a rural parish has done everything a community asks of him. The community’s side of that bargain is that he stays warm without liquidating his old age to do it. Whether his tank is full in January is not a price question. It is a question about whether the district keeps its side.
Dylan Williams drives a van business out of Monmouth across the Forest of Dean, Stroud and South Gloucestershire. He has raised his prices because he has to — £120 to £130 a tank in January is £160 now — and he is still driving. Yvette Farrell’s Dean Forest Kitchen still gets hot meals to isolated people across a rural district with no public transport, on a not-for-profit margin she describes, accurately, as having not a lot of wiggle room. Tristan Holland’s TLC Support Service still pays its carers 55 pence a business mile, and he said it plainly: “there has to be a profit or else we just can’t carry on going.”
Those three are doing exactly what a civic economy asks of the people inside it. They are serving a dispersed population that the commercial market would abandon at any fuel price, and they are absorbing the shock themselves rather than passing it down the lane to whoever cannot pay. Their fuel bill is not a cost of doing business. It is the price of holding a district together, and they are paying it out of a thin margin because nobody has offered to share it.
Wendell Berry has spent fifty years on what he calls the extractive mind in The Unsettling of America — the habit of taking what a place yields and moving on, and the matching habit of treating the people who stay as costs to be managed. Britain’s heating-oil design is that habit written into statute. Take the heat. Take the labour of the people who keep delivering it, the van driver, the cook, the care worker, the man filling his own tank. Leave the bill on a retired man’s kitchen table and call the resulting price accurate.
A price is only accurate if the household on the paying end can, in fact, pay it. A household that cannot is not receiving information. It is being told to leave.
Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the Competition and Markets Authority, said this week that stronger safeguards are needed — regulatory oversight, better support for vulnerable consumers, and help for communities exposed to higher and more volatile prices. She is right about the diagnosis. An unregulated market with a captive, dispersed customer base will keep producing exactly this, and it will keep producing it worst for the people with the least room to move. But regulation is a ceiling. What a household in January needs is a floor, and a cap on what the supplier can charge does not heat a tank that is already empty.
Corinne Pluchino of Action in Rural Communities England is asking the government to take VAT off heating oil and LPG for six months in this month’s budget. Take the honest measure of it. It is borrowed money, it expires in spring, and it builds nothing — no insulation, no installer, no institution the households will still own in five years. But a palliative is not nothing when the alternative is a retired man choosing between the tank and the prescription. Give it. Then stop calling it a policy, because it is not one.
The £9,000 grants to move oil-heated homes onto clean heat, and the resilience fund for areas with high oil dependence, are the better instrument, because they build rather than hold a line. The catch is the one every rural county already knows. A grant assumes there is an installer within driving distance, a household that can fund whatever the grant does not cover, and the appetite to gut a kitchen in February. In a county with the labour-force participation rate Adams County has and a median age in the middle fifties, that is real money standing in a real queue.
The instrument in this story that needs neither Whitehall nor a price cap is the Nadder Oil Buying Club, where Richard Willan says more than a thousand Wiltshire residents buy in bulk together to secure a better rate. That is a co-op. It is the same structure as the electric cooperative whose poles run past my shop. A thousand tanks bought together are a thousand tanks that can wait out a bad month, and a thousand households that are not each alone against a wholesale market.
That structure exists because somebody decided the market’s verdict on rural America was not final. In 1936 fewer than one farm in eleven in this country had electricity, and every investor-owned utility that looked at a county like mine reached the same conclusion: not enough customers per mile of wire. The Rural Electrification Act routed long, cheap loans to member-owned cooperatives instead of to those utilities, and the wire went in, and the wire is still here. My shop runs on it. So does the school district where Sara works. The buying club in Wiltshire is the same idea pointed at a different commodity, and it is the only thing in the whole BBC report that gives a household any power over the price at all.
Means-tested resilience works the same way, on local knowledge rather than on a formula. The Surviving Winter campaign run by Wiltshire charities supported more than three thousand people last year with heating costs — money to the household that genuinely cannot pay, delivered by people who know which doors to knock on. That is what a floor looks like when it is built from inside a place rather than issued to it.
Willan’s aside is worth keeping. “We are watching to see what happens with Donald Trump in the mid-term elections in America,” he said, “that might change things again.” He is not being political about it. He is being accurate. The price of his neighbours’ heat is set by a war and an American election, in that order, and there is nothing in Wiltshire or in Adams County that can change either one. What is left is what has always been left: whether the households that stay in a place are held by institutions that stayed too.
Mike is eight and Quinn is five. In twenty winters they will either live in a county that kept its old people warm, its meal kitchen running and its carers paid — or one where all three were somebody’s quarterly variable. The crude price is not the question. The question is whether we built anything that outlasts it.