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Truss is bound to get loud cheering when she arrives, because MPs are a tribal species and that’s what they do with new leaders (especially Tories). But Truss is the first Tory leader to be elected by a ballot of members who was not the first choice of her MPs, and by the end of August more than half of her MPs had still not pubicly endorsed her for leader. Much of the support she has will be conditional.
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Liz Truss is expected to announce some sort of freeze for energy bills tomorrow. In doing so, she will be playing catch-up with the main opposition parties. Keir Starmer published a plan in August showing how Labour would fund a price freeze which he said would mean consumers not having to pay “a penny more” this winter. But Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, published his own proposals for a price freeze a week earlier, and Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister, released his own blueprint, which included the option of energy companies being nationalised. The SNP has also called for prices to be frozen.
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But another former Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, has come out against a price freeze. His thinktank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, has this morning published its own plan for addressing the energy bills crisis and it proposes using rebates to help people with bills, not a price cap, with households on benefits getting the most support.
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The report says:
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It now appears that government is also considering some form of price freeze. Such an approach could meet the scale of the challenge facing householders head-on and would deal with the crisis this winter. But it is now clear that the crisis will last into next year and probably beyond, and over time the costs of such a freeze, if kept in place, would be fiscally alarming.
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A longer-term price freeze would also dampen incentives for households – especially the better-off ones – to cut their consumption where they reasonably can. While we all hope that price pressures will abate, it is conceivable that they won’t fall sufficiently to make government support unnecessary beyond this winter or beyond next year. If a price freeze is pursued, this makes coupling it with a large programme of demand reduction essential.
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But we favour a more strategic approach to this crisis that offers long-term certainty to households while strengthening incentives on them and government to accelerate steps towards the only real solution, which is a reduction…
Read More: PMQs live: new prime minister Liz Truss faces Keir Starmer for first time | Politics