LONDON: British Prime Minister David Cameron pledged yesterday to cut energy bills by reducing green levies but denied a BBC report that he had asked the country’s biggest gas and energy companies to hold prices steady until the 2015 election.
In an unusually sharp reprimand for the publicly funded British Broadcasting Corporation, a spokesman for Cameron’s office said the report which cited unidentified industry sources was utterly misleading.
The cost of everything from heating to rail tickets is the central focus of British domestic politics after the opposition Labour party tried to shift voters’ attention away from the return of economic growth onto a fall in their real incomes.
Details of a review of green levies will be unveiled by finance minister George Osborne in his December 5 Autumn Statement, a government spokesman said.
“I want to help households and families by getting sustainably low energy prices,” Cameron told reporters on the sidelines of a European Union summit in Lithuania yesterday.
“The only way you can do that is by increasing competition and rolling back the costs of some of the levies on people’s bills,” Cameron said. “That is what we are going to do.”
reuters
