Liz Truss’ energy plan will provide some welcome relief this winter for people struggling to pay their bills, but is a sticking-plaster solution that skips over cheaper, easier policies that could provide long-term relief from high bills.

People all around the country were anxiously waiting to hear the details of Liz Truss’ new energy announcement. Would they be able to afford heating this winter? Would they need to ration their family’s meals? Would she provide a roadmap out of this sorry state of affairs?

An emergency intervention on a grand scale was needed. Did she deliver?

In short: no. While the package will provide welcome relief to some struggling families this winter, it is a short-sighted, short-term, bungled fix – an expensive sticking plaster.

“To tackle the nation’s energy bills we need to reduce energy wastage by launching a countrywide retrofit programme of insulation and non-fossil-fuel domestic energy solutions such as solar energy and heat pumps”

To address the UK energy crisis once and for all, we need a leader who understands that oil and gas prices will continue to skyrocket, and to tackle the nation’s energy bills we need to reduce energy wastage by launching a countrywide retrofit programme of insulation and non-fossil-fuel domestic energy solutions such as solar energy and heat pumps.

Only these will quickly stop our homes, businesses and public buildings leaking carbon, money and heat. The added bonus is they will also provide much-needed jobs to every part of the UK with immediate effect. Indeed, according to new analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, investment in home insulation could be cost neutral around the end of the current parliamentary term, with reduced bills cutting the overall cost of the price freeze.

This June, Ashden published Creating Warmer Homes: Inspiration and practical retrofit advice for local authorities and national government, a policy briefing highlighting examples retrofit technologies transforming local housing, lives and energy bills. It calls for immediate local and national support for an urgent nationwide retrofit roll-out. We will publish a follow-up briefing on the need for a retrofit skills revolution later this month.

Ashden works with business and local authorities that manage and scale up these solutions, sharing their learning and experience with others to do the same. For instance, Kensa Heat Pumps, the UK’s only ground-source heat pump manufacturer and installer, is working to break down perceived barriers to the wide-spread electrification of heat and show policymakers and the public that networked heat pumps can achieve mass decarbonisation goals at scale for the lowest economic and societal cost.

“We need a prime minster who will help the country seize these opportunities to create a long-term fix to high energy bills, ending fuel poverty and dealing with the climate emergency simultaneously”

Carbon Co-op, B4Box and the Low Carbon Academy all focus on installation of and training in retrofit solutions in and around Manchester. They raise training and employment levels while making thousands of homes warmer, cheaper to run and more energy efficient.

There are also a range of interventions from local authorities. The City of York is building 600 Passivhaus (zero-carbon) homes, which lower household bills by 50%. North East Derbyshire District Council is working with expert partners to install external wall insulation at 324 council-owned ‘hard-to-treat’ homes in former mining communities. There are more examples in our climate action resources for UK councils.

We need a prime minster who will help the country seize these opportunities to create a long-term fix to high energy bills, ending fuel poverty and dealing with the climate emergency simultaneously.

Ashden, along with other non-governmental organisations in the Warm this Winter coalition, has been calling for the UK government to provide more emergency support to people this winter – and it’s good to see some of this detailed in the prime minister’s energy plan.

But, sadly, her plan says nothing about funding to help people cut their bills with better insulation, and contains little detail about how to rapidly move the country away from expensive gas to cheaper, renewable energy.

“It will be the taxpayer who pays for this intervention, we don’t even know how much yet”.

Instead, we were treated to a tired and misguided plan to launch new oil and gas licences – probably around 100 of them, Ms Truss said in her speech. A continued reliance on oil and gas will only cement our dependence on fossil-fuel giants – the same companies that are making record-breaking profits while ordinary people face record-breaking and life-destroying energy bills.

Many had hoped to see Ms Truss take a stand against such massive profiteering and enforce a windfall tax to redirect excess profits into emergency funding for scaling up domestic energy-efficiency measures and training for workers to undertake a UK-wide retrofit revolution in order for people to be less dependent on fossil fuels.

Instead, it will be the taxpayer who pays for this intervention, we don’t even know how much yet. Costings will not be released for a few weeks, but we do know fossil-fuel companies will continue to reap the rewards.