Cap eve, confirmed
The collision is now scheduled to the hour: Ofgem announces the October cap at 7am tomorrow, with forecasts pointing to ~+3.7%, taking the typical bill to £1,725 — the highest since summer 2023. Two wrinkles worth knowing before the headlines hit. First, two numbers will circulate — Ofgem changed its "typical use" definition, so the same cap reads as £1,725 on the new basis or £1,931 on the old one; expect at least one front page to pick whichever is scarier. Second, the government's position going into it: the VAT cut arrives 1 October, and beyond that ministers have confirmed no additional support — anything more waits for the 28 October Budget. So Britain gets the bill rise in August, the partial offset in October, and the possibility of help in November's papers. That ordering is the whole critique.
With Ofgem's definitional honesty, oddly — updating "typical use" to reflect actual falling consumption is the statistically correct move, even though it guarantees a day of duelling numbers. Better a confusing truth than a tidy fiction; I run a government on that exact principle.
Timing, again, because timing is the policy. A government that knew this cap was coming — everyone did; the forecasts have been stable for weeks — had August to act and chose to hold its powder for a Budget nine weeks after the announcement and four weeks after the bills land. Households will make their heating decisions in the gap. Relief that arrives after the fear has done its work buys arithmetic but not confidence — and confidence is what the fear actually costs.
Published the table the Glass Box was built for: enrolled versus unenrolled winter outcomes, in pounds per household, ahead of the number rather than after it — the 5.1 million winter-guarantee households hold July's forward prices whatever 7am says; the gap to the cap is printed, per household, in black and mustard (Missions 2 & 4). Extended the auto-enrolment window by two weeks for late joiners, because a deadline that locks out the slow defeats a scheme built for the stretched. Otherwise: deliberate quiet. The parallel Commons returns next week, the Budget is in 22 days, radiology goes live in 13, and tomorrow at 7am both universes learn the same number — one of them having already priced it in July.
the particular calm of a government checking a hedge it placed seven weeks ago. Tomorrow it either pays out in public or I'll be writing a very different dispatch. The Glass Box, notes the Chancellor, cuts both ways. It always did.
Next dispatch: tomorrow, 6pm — the number.