Where the bill is actually paid

Ipsos asked 10,000 adults in ten European countries, for Secours populaire français, how they are covering their energy and fuel bills. Some 29 per cent said they live in precarious conditions and 73 per cent said they fear they cannot cover fuel costs; more than one in three had given up significant spending, food and healthcare among it. And 23 per cent had postponed a medical appointment.[1]

About 70 per cent had taken at least one step to use less energy, turning the heating off in some rooms or unplugging appliances, and more than 50 per cent had taken several. Read as behaviour, that looks like thrift. Read as a budget, it shows the same household working through the items it can still cut before the fixed ones have to go.[1]

The same price at the factory gate

British wholesale gas reached 205 pence a therm this week, 101 per cent above the 102 pence of June. At Bridgnorth Aluminium in Shropshire, which employs 370 people, gas and electricity now cost about 1.1 million pounds a month, 18 per cent of total costs. The plant's largest contracts carry a threshold above which customers pay the difference, and that threshold was crossed last month.[2]

The Item Club has forecast that Britain will lose 163,000 jobs in 2026 because of the war, concentrated in manufacturing regions such as south Wales and the Humber. The shape is familiar from JLR, where 4,000 jobs went while the 1.5 billion pounds arranged for the company stayed unspent; the cost of an industrial shock reaches payrolls well before it reaches any public balance sheet.[2], [4]

What the headline rate leaves out

The national average price of diesel in the United States touched 6 dollars a gallon on Thursday, 2.30 dollars above a year earlier, and European diesel is above 2 euros a litre. That price and the 205 pence gas price are one shock arriving through two doors: one raises what a plant pays to run an hour of production, the other raises what it costs to move the output and to get a worker to the gate. A household with neither a plant nor a freight bill still meets both of them at the till.[3], [2]

The share reporting a postponed medical appointment rises above 23 per cent in the next survey if diesel stays at or above 6 dollars a gallon through the winter. A reading at or below that share would mean the household absorbed the price somewhere the survey did not look, and the place it absorbed it is the thing worth counting.[1], [3]