The Mirror reported recently that 18 million people are in a state of fuel poverty, spending 10% or more of their income on fuel.

This shows the need for the government to take firm action on using fuel sources over which we have no control of price. Reducing taxes helps people in the short term but keeps them in the cycle of rising prices while reducing the amount of money that the government has to spend on fixing the problem.

The government should be pouring money into insulating homes and starting energy companies that will put our energy money back into our tax system rather than all of it going abroad.

While we have cheap energy we have no incentive to reduce the amount of energy we are wasting. The government needs to take this in hand and take a long term energy security view on this.