MORE than 80,000 households in Scotland are facing the highest fuel price hikes announced so far, after EDF Energy confirmed it would raise its domestic gas and electricity tariffs by 10.8% in December.
The increase means a typical dual-fuel customer paying by direct debit will see bills rise by £122 to £1251 a year, although it will remain on average the cheapest supplier of the Big Six.
EDF, the fifth major supplier in recent weeks to announce higher prices, has 81,391 cus-tomers in Scotland from a total of 3.1 million UK-wide. The price changes will take effect from December 7.
E.ON is the only big supplier yet to announce price rises after it made a promise not to raise tariffs this year.
Trisha McAuley, deputy director at Consumer Focus Scotland, said: "Another price rise, hot on the heels of those we've already seen, will again feed into consumer concerns on pack behaviour and whether price changes are driven by real supply and demand issues. Energy firms obviously need to react to wholesale and other pricing pressures – but customers need to know the scale of changes is justified."
SSE, which trades as Southern Electric, Swalec and Scottish Hydro, increased tariffs by 9% on October 15, the same day as ScottishPower announced plans to hike bills by an average 7% from December 3. British Gas will impose an average increase of 6% affecting 8.5 million customers from November 16, with Npower planning an average rise of 8.8% for gas and 9.1% for electricity from November 26.
Firms have blamed the changes on rising wholesale prices and increased running costs.
Leila Deen from Greenpeace said: "The Prime Minister has got to get a grip and sort out the UK's energy sector. Making hollow promises about low tariffs, while millions of people are facing whopping rises in their bills, is nowhere near good enough."
Downing Street described the latest price rises as "very dis-appointing". A Number 10 spokeswoman said: "While we can't control world energy prices, we have been working very closely with the energy companies to make it easier for people to switch to find cheaper deals."
EDF director Martin Lawrence said: "We know customers will not welcome this news and do not want to see prices going up. Our new prices will however be cheaper on average than those of all the other major suppliers which have announced standard price rises so far this autumn."
He added the firm was taking steps to help vulnerable customers by ensuring those whom the Government identifies as most in need will automatically benefit from a discount equivalent to being on its cheapest tariff.
At Westminster, Labour insisted Scottish households faced a "winter of misery" in light of yet another energy price hike. Tom Greatrex, the Shadow Energy Minister, said: "Last week, the Prime Minister promised to legislate to force energy companies to put everyone on the cheapest tariff. Within 24 hours, this policy had completely un-ravelled and the public have been left to pay the price for David Cameron's incompetence."
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