Cost-of-living crisis: Why the UK is 'not necessarily the miser of Europe’ on energy

At 8pm on Thursday evening, Italy’s historic buildings and landmarks suddenly plunged into darkness.

Simultaneously scheduled across more than 8,000 towns and cities across the country, the blackout saw monuments including the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and the capital’s Capitoline Hill turn out their lights in protest at rocketing utility bills in the country.

“The increase in bills is a burden and puts families and institutions in serious difficulty,” Rome mayor Roberto Gualtieri told media, in support of the movement organised by the National Association of Italian Municipalities.

As bills continue their inevitable rise across Europe – hit by a perfect storm of supply restrictions across the continent from Russia, countries such as China buying up more international gas shipments and unusually still winds last summer, meaning more gas was needed to replace the electricity that would otherwise have been produced by wind turbines – there are few countries in the region unaffected by the crisis.

People burn their electricity bills as a protest against high energy prices in Turkey.

In Italy, the energy regulator warned at the end of last year that electricity bills would leap by 54 per cent and gas by 41.8 per cent, despite billions of euros of public money having already been pumped into the system to mitigate rises for consumers. Without that, the regulator said, the rises would have been 65 per cent and 59.2 per cent respectively.

Similarly, in Scotland and the rest of the UK, householders are bracing themselves for a huge hike in utility bills later this year as Ofgem increased the energy price cap by 54 per cent, to account for spiralling wholesale energy costs across Europe.

The Italian protest comes in the same week thousands of people took to the streets in Turkey to burn their electricity bills in protests at “unbearable” costs. Some restaurants and cafes have begun to add a heating tax to their table charge as they struggle to pay utilities.

"The UK isn’t facing this crisis alone, it’s a global energy crisis with rising prices everywhere,” says Josie Dent, managing economist at the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

European energy prices have already risen by an average of 28.8 per cent in the year to January. However, how that has played out for the coffers of consumers in different nations has depended very much on the funding packages implemented by government.

The French Government, which relies more heavily on nuclear power than the UK, recently announced household bills would not increase by more than 4 per cent. In December, the Norwegian authorities pledged to cover 55 per cent of consumers’ bill on energy prices above a monthly average of 70 øre per kilowatt-hour, increasing the support to 80 per cent last month following pressure from the opposition.

At the other end of the scale, four million German households are set to see their bills rise by 60 per cent after the country announced a relatively paltry cut to a surcharge on bills there used to fund renewable energy development.