In this month's letter, Yuan Yang, the Labour MP for Earley and Woodley, highlights government measures to tackle the cost of living. She writes:
One of the biggest ways we feel the cost of living is in our electricity bills. At the same time, when I speak to residents at my regular community catch-ups as well as to students in my school assemblies, I often hear concerns about climate change, and the preservation of nature in our area.
The government’s Local Power Plan, published last week, hopes to address both of those issues.
The Local Power Plan is the largest public investment in community-owned energy in British history. It will see a £1 billion fund invested in local energy projects, through a partnership with the publicly owned company Great British Energy. As a result of this investment, less money from electricity bills will go to faraway shareholders and will instead stay in local communities.
For us, this means that groups like Reading Community Energy Society (RCES) will be able to bid for more resources to invest in our area, with projects like community-owned solar on public buildings. Other parts of the UK may be bidding for local wind power generation projects, or even hydropower.
RCES currently raise money from community share purchases, and install solar panels at no cost to the user – for example, on school roofs. This means cheap energy for schools and other organisations. I met with RCES at their biggest solar installation site in the University of Reading, and they are always looking for more sites – so if you have any leads, please get in touch with them!
Altogether, the investment from the Local Power Plan will increase our clean energy output and combat climate change, while also keeping bills down. Once the upfront investment in panels has been made, the day-to-day cost of generating electricity from green sources like solar power is almost zero – compared to much higher costs for oil and gas generation.
In April, the government is also taking up to £150 off your yearly energy bills, because of measures in last year’s November budget.
This is on top of the government extending the £150 Warm Home Discount. Over 1 in 13 households in Earley and Woodley constituency are in fuel poverty, meaning they can’t keep their homes adequately heated, so this extension has helped massively during such a cold time of the year.
It’s these changes and more that are tackling the cost of living, and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do with the new local funding; If you’re interested in the great work that the Reading Community Energy Society is doing, then you can check them out at https://readingenergy.coop/.
And as always, if you ever need me and my office to assist you with any issue, you can write to me at yuan.yang.mp@parliament.uk.
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