Back Bills and Benefits

Money Box

BBC

Business

4.2 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We report from Parliament as the Minister for Energy Consumers and the regulator Ofgem face questions from MPs about the banned process of back-billing. That's when energy suppliers wrongly send new bills for energy use longer than 12 months ago. We'll get reaction from Labour MP Bill Esterson who is the Chair of the House of Commons Energy Security and Net Zero committee, which sat on Wednesday.

And the biggest shake-up to benefits in a decade was announced by the government this week. It hopes the changes will ultimately save it five billion pounds a year from a benefits bill which Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall told Parliament was 'a failing system that is currently not sustainable'. She proposed major changes to some benefits, what will this mean in practice?

Presenter: Paul Lewis Reporters: Dan Whitworth and Eimear Devlin Researcher: Jo Krasner Editor: Jess Quayle

(First broadcast 12pm Saturday 22nd March 2025)

Transcript

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0:00.0	If a Banksy appeared on your house, you'd be sitting on a fortune, right?
0:07.0	At first you think you're gifted, but you're actually not.
0:10.5	This is a tale of two murals, Margate's Valentine's Day Mascara and the lowest off seagull.
0:17.3	And the true cost of free art for the people who have to live with it.
0:21.5	40,000 pounds cost per annum.
0:23.8	We didn't know what to do.
0:25.5	Nobody's turned up to say, we'll help you protect it.
0:29.0	The Banksy story.
0:30.3	When Banksy comes to town, listen on BBC Sounds.
0:36.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:39.3	Hello, welcome to this Moneybox podcast.
0:42.3	The biggest cuts to social security benefits in more than a decade were announced this week.
0:47.1	The government wants to cut £5 billion from what it calls an unsustainable benefits bill,
0:52.3	but who will pay the price?
0:53.9	More on that later. But first,
0:55.9	there is no excuse for treating customers the way energy companies do over back billing. That's
1:01.3	when they unlawfully send out new bills for electricity or gas used longer than 12 months ago.
1:06.6	And that's what a senior MP, Bill Esterson, the Labour Chair of Parliament's Energy Security Select Committee, told Moneybox.
1:14.0	It comes after his committee demanded answers on the practice, following extensive investigations by this programme.
1:20.0	I'll be speaking to Bill Esterson live in a few minutes, but first our reporter Dan Whitworth,
1:24.7	took two Moneybox listeners who were victims of the band practice
1:28.0	to London to hear the MPs speak. David Evans and Haley Jarvis were each wrongly charged
	...

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