UK Aid for Energy Bills Could Pay for Itself, Deutsche Bank Says

Properly designed UK support to cut household energy bills could help reduce both inflation and government debt service costs, potentially resulting in an aid package that pays for itself, Deutsche Bank said.

Expenditure of around £4 billion ($5.3 billion) to offset the price shock caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran could bring the consumer price index down by 0.4 percentage points, Sanjay Raja, the bank’s chief UK economist, wrote in a note on Friday. That would be the projected result of extending a freeze in fuel duty until the end of the fiscal year next March as well as trimming government-mandated charges embedded in a typical household’s energy bill for nine months, he said.