10. Short Debate: Supporting people in a cost-of-living crisis

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 7:13 pm on 25 January 2023.

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Photo of Jane Hutt Jane Hutt Labour 7:13, 25 January 2023

Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. Can I start by thanking Jack Sargeant for bringing this debate today? It does provide me with an opportunity, once again, to reassure people across Wales that supporting them through this cost-of-living crisis remains our priority. I've talked at length in recent months about the impact of spiralling energy prices, the effect of inflation, particularly food inflation, the disastrous fall-out from the UK Government's mishandling of the economy, which has decimated our budgets and pushed people into poverty.

But these facts and figures don't tell you what this crisis actually means for people living with those pressures every day. They don't convey the personal cost to the mother who is going without food so that her children can be fed, the elderly person who is too worried about their finances to put the heating on, or the harrowing experience of the family that find themselves homeless because they can no longer afford their rent—one of an ever-increasing number of families and individuals that are experiencing being without a home for the first time. The bottom line is, Dirprwy Lywydd, that the amount of money that people have coming in, increasingly, no longer covers the amount needed to cover the basic essentials for life such as housing costs, heating and food. The books no longer balance, and as the weeks go past, their capacity to meet these essential costs reduces further and their levels of debt increase.

But I share the concerns that Jack Sargeant has raised today in this debate, in the topical question earlier on this afternoon, consistently at every opportunity, about the growing use of prepayment meters by energy companies as a means of reclaiming energy debt. We know that paying for energy charges on a prepayment plan is significantly more expensive for some of the most vulnerable and poorest households in our society, even where that customer is on a smart meter and there's no increase in the administrative charges for the supplier. So, on Monday this week—and I've reported on this already this afternoon—I met once again with energy suppliers and I called on them to give me their assurance that due diligence was being followed and people were not being moved onto prepayment meters against their will, in particular those already on a smart meter. I will continue to meet with them regularly to ensure that, on the promises they gave me—and they did give me some promises about their practices, saying one after another that this was only a last resort—I will hold them to account in my engagement with them and look to those means, which have been raised by Jack and colleagues today, where we could actually influence those decisions.