Energy bill help for businesses will start from October even if payments have to be backdated, says No 10 – UK politics live | Politics

Businesses will receive money to help them with increases to their fuel bills from October, Downing Street has announced. It made the commitment in response to today’s Financial Times story saying that business figures have been told the energy support scheme for companies may not be in operation until November. (See 10.06am.)

In response to the initial FT story, the government just said it was working to get the business support scheme up and running as soon as possible.

But today Downing Street said that, even if it is not operational at the start of October, payments would be backdated to that point so that they did not lose out. The PM’s spokesperson told reporters:

We will confirm further details of the business support scheme next week. The scheme will support businesses with their October energy bills and that includes through backdating if necessary.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) has welcomed my colleague Denis Campbell’s report that the government is considering abandoning its anti-obesity strategy, which involves measures to stop people eating too much junk food. John O’Connell, its chief executive, said:

Junking these nanny state policies is long overdue.

Plans to end buy-one-get-one-free were only going to pile pressure on hard-hit households during a cost of living crisis.

Government cannot expect taxpayers to further tighten their belts and Truss is right to row it back.

The TPA, which campaigns for low taxes and against some government spending (what it describes as “waste”), has never been seen as one of Whitehall’s more powerful thinktanks or pressure groups since it was set up almost 20 years ago. But that might be about to change. Liz Truss, the new prime minister, is sympathetic to the alliance’s thinking and she has just hired Matthew Sinclair as her chief economic adviser. Sinclair spent six years at the TPA, ending up becoming its chief executive in 2012.

The former Lib Dem adviser Polly Mackenzie reckons that, on this policy, the TPA has got its logic all wrong; getting rid of the anti-obesity strategy will lead to higher costs for taxpayers, she argues. (See 10.30am.)

You can read the state of the union speech by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, to MEPs here. Here is a summary of the announcements in it from the commission. And here are some of the key passages.

She was a constant throughout the turbulent and transforming events in the last 70 years.

Stoic and steadfast in her service.

But more than anything, she always found the right words for every moment in time …

And when I think of the situation we are in today, her words at the height of the pandemic still resonate with me.

She said: “We will succeed – and that success will belong to every one of us.”

She always reminded us that our future is built on new ideas and founded in our oldest values.

• She said the EU was “in it for the long haul” in terms of supporting Ukraine. And she said it was not just a war on Ukraine, but “a war on our energy, a war on our economy, a war on our values and a war on our future”.

The commission will work with Ukraine to ensure seamless access to the single market. And vice-versa.

Our single market is one of Europe’s greatest success stories. Now it’s time to make it a success story for our Ukrainian friends, too.

And this is why I am going to Kyiv today, to discuss this in detail with President Zelenskiy.

We introduced legislation to screen foreign direct investment in our companies for security concerns.

If we do that for our economy, shouldn’t we do the same for our values?

We need to better shield ourselves from malign interference.

This is why we will present a defence of democracy package.

It will bring covert foreign influence and shady funding to light.

We will not allow any autocracy’s Trojan horses to attack our democracies from within.

When Liz Truss announced her “energy price guarantee” last week, households were relatively clear about what they would receive, but the promise of help for businesses was much more vague. Companies and corporate groups are still very nervous, and yesterday one trade association said its members were “at the end of their tether” not knowing if they would survive this winter.

According to a report in the Financial Times today, corporate Britain is right to be worried. Daniel Thomas, Jim Pickard and Nathalie Thomas say the support scheme promised by Truss may not be operational until November. In their report they say:

Executives have been told in recent meetings with the government of the risk the scheme may not be ready until November, although officials said they still hoped the scheme would go live next month.

“It is not worked through yet,” said one government official. “I don’t know whether it will come in before November. There’s some debate about whether it can be brought forward and happen before then.”

Truss said last week that unit prices for households would be capped, so that a typical household will pay no more than £2,500 a year on energy bills for the next year. She said businesses would get “equivalent support”. But businesses are not covered by the Ofgem price cap that applies to consumers, and the FT says “with no existing mechanism in place, ministers and officials are still struggling to work out how to limit companies’ energy bills.” The report goes on:

The government would provide energy suppliers with the difference between a new lower price and what energy retailers would otherwise charge business customers.

But while ministers have outlined this broad framework, they have yet to decide on the precise system for implementing it.

The government has not denied that the scheme may not be ready until November. A government spokesperson said officials were working “at pace” to deliver the support scheme for businesses and that details of the scheme, and timings for when it would start, would be announced as soon as possible.

Good morning. There is very little public politics taking place in Britain right now (although the events following the death of the Queen are political in a broader sense, and anyone familiar with how a political campaign operates will have been watching what King Charles has been doing in recent days, no doubt with sympathy, but also immense admiration for his professionalism.) But in Brussels normal politics continues, and this morning Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, has just delivered her state of the union speech to the European parliament.

There was a lot in it, particularly about Ukraine, and I will post a full summary later, but for readers in the UK what she said about energy was particularly interesting – because it was so different from what the British government is saying.

• Von der Leyen proposed recouping money from energy companies, saying “profits must be channelled to those who need it most”. She said there should be a cap on profits for companies making energy from renewables, and she said fossil fuel companies should also pay more during the crisis – calling in effect for a windfall tax, although she described it as a “crisis contribution”. She said:

Millions of Europeans need support.

EU member states have already invested billions of euros to assist vulnerable households.

But we know this will not be enough.

This is why we are proposing a cap on the revenues of companies that produce electricity at a low cost.

These companies are making revenues they never accounted for, they never even dreamed of.

In our social market economy, profits are good.

But in these times it is wrong to receive extraordinary record profits benefitting from war and on the back of consumers.

In these times, profits must be shared and channelled to those who need it the most.

Our proposal will raise more than €140bn for member states to cushion the blow directly.

And because we are in a fossil fuel crisis, the fossil fuel industry has a special duty, too.

Major oil, gas and coal companies are also making huge profits. So they have to pay a fair share – they have to give a crisis contribution.

These are all emergency and temporary measures we are working on, including our discussions on price caps.

Although Liz Truss, the new UK prime minister, is not reversing the windfall tax on energy companies announced early this year when Boris Johnson was in No 10, in her first PMQs last week she firmly stated her opposition to windfall taxes on principle.

Think of the workers in ceramics factories in central Italy who have decided to move their shifts to the early morning to benefit from the lower energy prices.

And just imagine the mothers and fathers among those workers having to leave home early when the kids are still sleeping because of the war they have not chosen.

This is one example in a million of examples of Europeans adapting to the new reality.

I want our union to take example from its people. So reducing demand during peak hours will make supply last longer and it will bring prices down.

This is why we’re putting forward measures for member states to reduce the overall electricity consumption.

Again, this is a contrast with the UK, where the government has been reluctant to encourage people to use less energy, or to promote anything that might smack of energy rationing.

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