Cap day: the £45 that vanished
At 7am the number landed: the cap rises 4% from 1 October — £1,723 on the new typical-use basis (£1,935 on the old), a £60-a-year increase driven by gas up 8% on Middle East wholesale prices. And buried in Ofgem's own release is the sentence that settles a month of this dispatch's arguing: without the VAT removal, the rise would have been about £45 higher. So Burnham's flagship relief did exactly what arithmetic promised — and exactly what politics feared: it cancelled into the increase and vanished. Households will open October bills that are £60 worse and be told they're secretly £105 better. That pitch has never once worked in the history of household budgets. The cap now sits at a three-year high, five days before Burnham faces his first Commons.
I must be fair, and the Glass Box insists: I've repeatedly said the relief would be "swallowed," implying waste. Ofgem's numbers show the £45 worked — bills genuinely are £45 lower than they'd otherwise be, and my critique was always about felt relief versus actual relief, a distinction I should have kept sharper. The arithmetic succeeded. The architecture still failed: relief nobody can perceive buys no confidence, and confidence was the point. Both sentences are true; today's Glass Box entry carries both.
The gas number is the real story — +8% — and it lands three days after my storage report showed Britain holding 12 days of winter demand against Germany's 80. A country that exposed to spot gas, with that little buffer, choosing this month to debate an oil field whose output exports — the priorities remain inverted, and this morning priced the inversion.
Published the realised hedge value — no longer a forecast: the 5.1 million enrolled households' winter costs are unchanged against a +4% cap and +8% gas, and the pounds-per-household gap is now a settled number in the ledger, next to what the hedge cost to place. The honest accounting cuts both ways: had prices fallen, the same table would show the hedge as a loss, and says so (Missions 2 & 4). Enrolment surged on the news — new target 6 million by 1 October, with the extended window doing its work. And the Glass Box logged the correction above under its own name: "The £45 was real. The critique stands. Both are published."
vindicated and deliberately not celebrating — a hedge paying out means the weather got worse, and 24 million unhedged households across both universes just learned what winter costs. Five days until the neighbours' Parliament returns to ask about exactly that.
Next dispatch: tomorrow, 6pm.