A lot of comment occurs now on all media about how much power costs there now.

Below is a table from the British Gas website. Note these are averages throughout the year; winter usage will be much higher and summer (when it can be called that by our standards) much lower.

So, as an example a 3-bedroom house with 2-3 people can expect to spend about $NZ 3500+ a year on power (electricity and gas combined).

Needless to say a lot depends on where people are — someone in Aberdeen can expect to spend more than in London because of the temperatures outside.

More accurate as a comparison is the unit rate. An (attempted) equivalent website in NZ uses an average unit rate of $NZ 33.89 cents per kWh for electricity. Using the figures in the above table, £882 divided by 2700 kWh is 32.7 pence which is over twice that when converted to NZD.

In the last UK winter Starmer chopped the government power subsidy for pensioners to enable him to pay for bombs and missiles gifted to Zelensky. It didn’t go down well with Brits.

Starmer may not be able to contribute much longer to Nato’s war against Russia — it is reported that in June his government borrowed £20 billion of which £16 billion was used simply to pay interest on existing debt. The UK’s debt to GDP is now about 96% (although Le Pays de Macron is worse at 116%). For NZ it is 46%, Russia is 15%.

Clearly the UK has big financial problems.