As the UK’s leading power suppliers announce they are putting up their prices, a national landlords association is asking its members to help out its tenants by bringing their fuel bills down.
In the last few days npower have announced price hikes of 9% for gas and electricity customers and British Gas have followed suit and upped their prices by about 6%. The increases will affect millions of customers and will include many tenants who live in homes covered by landlord insurance.
David Salusbury, leader of the National Landlords Association, is now asking landlords to help their tenants out by taking advantage of the Government’s Green Deal to upgrade the energy efficiency of their properties. The Green Deal allows landlords in certain properties to take advantage of loans that will allow them to install energy efficiency measures such as central heating, loft insulation and cavity wall insulation. The loans are repaid via the fuel bills paid by tenants living at the property. Crucially tenants do not find themselves paying out more than before because the Green Deal stipulates that the energy saved by the home improvements means the energy bill will never be higher than it would have been if the work had not been carried out.
Mr. Salusbury said: “We hope that the Green Deal will help tenants reduce their energy consumption, in turn easing the impact of any energy price rises.” Of course landlords and tenants alike should always consider changing their utility provider when then their current supplier puts prices up. It is quite easy to get an online quote on savings that could be made by changing provider, and in many cases they can be quite substantial. Uswitch, one of the leading price comparison websites, say that savings of up to £200 a year are not unusual.