Energy Price Guarantee: Liz Truss’s gigantic state handout

The PM railed against government-funded largesse on the campaign trail. Now she is introducing energy price guarantees that will cost more than furlough. Is that a good idea?

Liz Truss and her Cabinet
Liz Truss: the lady is for turning
(Image credit: © Getty Images)

Last Thursday the new prime minister Liz Truss, who had previously dismissed “handouts” as a way of tackling the cost of living crisis, announced a taxpayer-funded “Energy Price Guarantee” that amounts to a two-year direct grant to all households, regardless of whether they need any help or not.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.