Recommendation 20

In April 2023, the government will replace the Energy Bill Relief Scheme with the Energy Bill Discount Scheme. This will support businesses for 12 months from April 2023 by providing a discount on their energy bills if wholesale prices are above a certain threshold. Businesses in certain Energy and Trade-Intensive sectors will receive a higher level of support, based on the government’s standard industrial classification of sectors.45 The majority of these sectors are in manufacturing industry but also include libraries, museums and zoos. We therefore asked why these sectors had been included as part of the new schemes, while restaurants and pubs had been excluded. The Department explained that the sector which included libraries and museums also included “highly traded” sectors, but recognised that any scheme which used an approach based on large categories would “end up with a mix of those who are really deserving and those who are less deserving”.46 We were concerned that this approach might not fully take account of variations in the make up of different sectors. The Department told us that while it had teams working specifically on some sectors, such as pubs and hospitality, it accepted that it did not, because of the number of sectors in the economy, understand every one of them well. It explained that, ultimately, decisions about the methodology for the new scheme and which sectors had been classified as trade intensive, were decided by Treasury Ministers. HM Treasury told us that its decisions on which sectors to support were partly based on whether the sector was competing globally, such as steel and concrete, and that the sector which included libraries and museums also included internationally traded antiquarian and other booksellers.47