Energy bills support delayed again

Published: Monday, 30 January 2023

THE £400 Energy Bills Support Scheme Alternative Funding (EBSS AF) delayed for four weeks,

Portal now due to open on Monday February 27th, writes Kelvin Alexander-Duggan.

Delayed again

The long awaited £400 Energy Bills Support Scheme Alternative Funding (EBSS AF) which was due to be received by around 900,000 households across the UK is delayed again.

The payment is specifically for those who do not have a direct relationship with their electricity supplier from next month.

This includes park home residents, those who live in houseboats, off-grid boaters and care homes, or people paying their energy bills as part of an all-inclusive rental agreement with their landlord.

The UK Government had previously announced that the application portal for the one-off lump sum was set to open on Monday 30th January 2023. However, Energy Minister Graham Stuart told MPs in the House of Commons on Wednesday 25th January 2023 that the opening has been delay by four weeks, it is now due to open on Monday February 27th, 2023.

Mr Stuart explained how he met with four separate local authorities helping with a test scheme for the portal and stated that the complexity of the payment meant it was necessary to get it right first time—or face the risk of severe delays to payments made to hundreds of thousands of households.

Complex problem to solve

Part of the complexity being caused by the small group with a deluded fear of being put on any government database. Members of this group have gone to great lengths to live out of sight of official authorities for their own reasons. Many fear being hounded by the authorities if their details appear on a government database. I'm sure that HMRC would take a great interest in people who have not appeared in the tax and National Insurance records for some time. And would like to know how they have been funding their lifestyle with no declared means of income.

Another problem is people with no fixed address that appears on a database, Often these people either use a mail service or a family address for snail mail, some even just use the postal restante service of the Post Office. One of the problems here is that the address will show that it has a grid connection in 99.9 percent of cases. With the need to prevent fraud and multiple applications using different C/O addresses. I expect with these applications, more information will be asked for by the authorities to validate a claim, therefore taking longer to process.

Most claims will be straight forward to process as the address of the household along with the details of the person making the application will be on most of the official databases.

Citizens Advice misinformation

Robin Deal was given the wrong information by the Citizen Advice Energy Department. The information that he was supplied with by the CAB was correct, if he was renting a dwelling (House/Flat)in which the landlord has a domestic energy account for the dwelling in his name with a energy company and not the renter. In this case the the energy rebate would be paid to the landlord automaticity over six months and by Law must pass the full amount to the renter. A marina would have a business account with a energy company, So Robin Deal and others would be wasting their time putting pressure on their marina management and in some cases may result in loss of moorings.

The only way for Robin Deal and others to get the £400 energy rebate is to apply for a one-off payment of £400 from the Energy Bills Support Scheme Alternative Funding, through the GOV.UK portal or by the dedicated helpline once it finally opens. The rebate will then be paid directly to them by their local authority, once his application has been processed and verified.