Martin Lewis reveals real energy bill savings in withering OFGEM price cap assessment
Martin Lewis has dismissed OFGEM's claim of average annual household savings of £129 following a 7% price cap drop as 'totally misleading'.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain on the morning of the announcement (23 May), Lewis explained the figure is based on an annual saving - but the price cap is reviewed every quarter.
'OFGEM quotes this 'typical use' figure which is meaningless because nobody is average - almost everyone is above average or below average on their use,' Lewis said.
'You can't save £129 a year because the price cap only lasts three months and it'll move again in October.'
The finance guru revealed a 'far better way' to calculate savings - based on every £100 spent now, versus in July, when the price cap changes come into effect.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Forbes
36 minutes ago
- Forbes
The U.K.'s Fastest-Growing Startups. What Are Their Growth Secrets?
Marisa Poster says her company identified an unmet need What does a successful British startup look like in 2025? Well, viewed through the prism of VC funding, a typical fast-growth company is probably developing AI solutions or working in quantum computing, climate tech or life sciences. But that's not the whole story. Founders club, For Entrepreneurs By Entrepreneurs (FEBE) has just released a list of 100 rapidly growing businesses, painting an alternative picture of entrepreneurship in Britain today. Styled as the FEBE Growth 100 and produced in collaboration with Virgin , the list draws on a list of metrics - including two-year compound growth, revenue performance and founder involvement - to create a ranking of private companies that are still owned and run by their creators. And while technology ventures certainly do feature, the majority of the companies are consumer-facing and not necessarily tech-driven. A case in point is the company that occupies the 'number one' slot, namely Perfect Ted. Co-founded by Marisa Poster, Levi Levenfiche and Teddie Levenfiche, the business specializes in Matcha drinks, including lattes. Close behind is haircare brand REHAB at number 2, with food delivery service Simmer Eat and party games company, Lucky Egg at positions 3 and 4, respectively. Tech enters the picture at number 5, in the shape of Manchester-based innovation studio Conductr. Elsewhere, you'll find fintechs, restaurant chains, fashion retailers and business service providers. But here's the question. Other than providing a talking point and perhaps also a celebration of entrepreneurship, do lists of this sort provide any insights into business success? Or to put it another way, do they point to any common factors that have helped some very diverse ventures to pile on sales year-on-year? To find out, I spoke to three of the entrepreneurs whose companies are featured. The aforementioned Marisa Poster, Simmy Dhillon of Simmer Eats and Jacyn Heavens of B2B business services platform EPOS Now. Leveraging Personal Experience There were some common threads, perhaps the most obvious being the ability of the founders to identify hitherto untapped demand. 'I'm very happy with our growth so far, and I think it's a testament to serving a need that was unmet,' says Marisa Poster. 'I personally had a problem with the type of caffeine that I was consuming and couldn't find anything that would work with my kind of neurodivergent brain.' If conventional lattes and espressos didn't work, neither did energy drinks, seen by Poster as hyper-masculine. What she did hit upon was Matcha, based on tea leaves and used in Japan for ceremonial purposes. Detecting a gap in the market, Poster launched a drinks brand. It was a play based on personal experience. The same could be said for the thinking behind EPOS Now. As Founder Jacyn Heavens explains, when he launched a restaurant and bar he quickly realised that small businesses can struggle when it comes to administration. 'I really wasn't prepared for how complicated it is to run a small business,' he says. 'I remember when I started our business, I needed to do everything from stock control to employee management, to negotiating with suppliers to figuring out what my prices should be. Literally everything.' EPOS Now started out as a cloud provider of point-of-sale services. Since then, features have been added to the platform, including. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the activities that Heavens found so onerous, the functions include stock control, employee management and pricing advice based on data. Finding Customers Having an idea is one thing, connecting with customers is quite another. Heavens' approach was to use a combination of SEO and Google Adwords. 'I learned AdWords, learned how to build a website, and built it all up in a basic e-commerce site. And off we kind of went.' The model, as he describes it, was to augment SEO marketing with paid ads, with everything feeding through to a landing page and call centre. Simmy Dhillion took a different approach. Simmer Heat started out using a university kitchen to create and then deliver healthy meals that could simply be heated up, with students as a key customer group. The approach the company took was direct. 'It started off me going into university halls and handing out little business cards, speaking to people on the bus,' says Dhillion. Social Media was also important. Simmer Heat asked their customers to post pictures online when they received deliveries. By replying to the posts, the company built a relationship with buyers. In addition, the company has worked with influencers to get the story across. For its part, Perfect Ted has something of a kick start. Following an appearance on the U.K. entrepreneur pitch show Dragons Den - modelled on Shark Tank - the company gained an angel investor (Stephen Bartlett) and a lot of publicity. There was a further boost when supermarkets began to stock the brand. Building Momentum The challenge facing all businesses is to build momentum and how that is done clearly depends on the nature of the business. Working in the B2B market, Heavens says the biggest challenge was to stay ahead of the competition. When the company started, there were very few cloud-based POS providers. Now it is common. To maintain growth, the company expanded the platform into a complete business admin service while also taking a risk on expanding to the U.S. Turnover has now hit £150 million. Dhillon says that building fundamental skills with Social Media have enabled Simmer Heat to grow without a large marketing budget. 'A lot of brands start off with a large budget and they are a bit lazy in terms of thinking 'we can pay to force ourselves in front of customers, so let's just keep paying and paying and paying.' We had to kind of do that the other way in terms of earning our place in front of customers,' says was then augmented by some, but limited paid advertising. Perfect Ted has taken a similar approach. The company uses employee created content on social media. There is some paid marketing, but the budget isn't huge, Is there a secret sauce that helps to underpin growth? For Heavens, the key is listening to the customer and being fanatical about acting on feedback. Dhillion says it's important to test out new things and not be afraid of failing. Poster agrees that it's important to try out ideas even if some fail. Both see it is important to have staff who are themselves entrepreneurial. As Poster puts it:'willing to drive the car.' And of course, there is no common route to success, aside from the drive of the owners, finding a product that resonates with the target market and then finding a means to connect with customers and keep on connecting.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
1,300-tonne viaduct deck slid into place on HS2 route
A 1,300-tonne viaduct deck has been slid into place as part of HS2. The viaduct, which is 220 metres long and constructed from steel and concrete, was assembled alongside its final location before being carefully moved into position over three days, reaching its northern abutment on June 20. Sam Arrowsmith, project manager at HS2 Ltd, said: "It's great to see the viaduct deck in position and I'd like to thank everyone who's helped get us to where we are today. "The slide may only have taken three days, but it was the culmination of four years of work – developing the design, completing the groundworks and the piers and assembling the enormous steelwork." The viaduct will eventually carry high-speed trains over Banbury Lane and forms part of the new HS2 route between London and the West Midlands. It is designed to manage flood risk by maintaining natural water flow in the valley, and features weathering steel intended to blend into the rural landscape. The deck was slid into place using PTFE-coated pads to reduce friction between the structure and the temporary steel bearings on the five supporting concrete piers. Lower Thorpe is the last of five viaducts installed using this method by EKFB, the main contractor for the central section of HS2. EKFB is a consortium comprising Eiffage, Kier, Ferrovial Construction and BAM Nuttall. With the steelwork now in place, the next phase will see the deck lowered 60 centimetres onto its permanent bearings, followed by construction of the concrete deck and parapets. Janice McKenna, technical director at EKFB, said: "The strategic design approach applied to these double composite structures has been a game-changer in how we're building these viaducts. "The double composite solution can be applied to multiple structures in different locations, and we have five across EKFB's 50-mile route that are all well into construction. "The philosophy was to design the viaducts with architectural input to 'blend' the structures into their respective landscapes and reduce the visual impact on the environment. "We also required a solution that offered specific delivery benefits too, from saving embedded carbon in the materials we use, to enhancing productivity on site and reducing safety risk." The double composite design uses steel beams with reinforced concrete layers above and below, reducing the carbon footprint by up to 59 per cent compared to traditional pre-stressed concrete beams. The viaduct will eventually support high-speed trains between London and the West Midlands, easing congestion and increasing capacity on the existing rail network.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
£10,000 invested in Palantir stock 2 years ago is now worth…
Investing £10,000 in Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR) stock two years ago would have been an extraordinary financial decision. Over that period, the stock has surged by an astonishing 858% in US dollar terms. To put this into perspective, an initial £10,000 investment would have grown to approximately £95,800 before considering changes in the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar. However, the British pound has strengthened against the US dollar during this timeframe, moving from an exchange rate of £1 = $1.28 to £1 = $1.37. When factoring in this currency appreciation, the value of the investment, when converted back to pounds, would be around £89,530. This means that despite the pound's strengthening, the investment still yielded a remarkable return, nearly multiplying almost ninefold. The hype surrounding Palantir is rooted in artificial intelligence (AI). At its core, Palantir is a data analytics and AI company that specialises in transforming vast amounts of complex data into actionable insights. Its technology is widely used by government agencies, including defense and intelligence sectors. This gives it a reputation for reliability and strategic importance. Beyond government contracts, Palantir has aggressively expanded into commercial markets, offering its data platforms to industries ranging from healthcare to finance. This dual-market approach has fuelled optimism about its growth potential. Furthermore, Palantir's origin story, co-founded by Peter Thiel, is shrouded in a degree of secrecy. This has added to its allure, creating a narrative of a cutting-edge tech company solving some of the world's most challenging problems. Despite the impressive stock performance and the hype, Palantir's valuation metrics are bonkers. The company's price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios, both trailing and forward-looking, are extraordinarily high compared to the technology sector median. The forward non-GAAP P/E ratio stands at approximately 248, while the sector median is just under 24. This means Palantir is trading at more than 10 times the typical valuation of its peers. Other valuation measures, such as price-to-sales (P/S) and enterprise value to sales ratios, are similarly stretched. Palantir's P/S ratio exceeding 100 compared to a sector median of around three. Growth-adjusted metrics are still concerning. Palantir's forward price-to-earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio stands at 7.99, compared to the technology sector average of just 1.8. This means Palantir is valued at over four times the sector average relative to its expected earnings growth, highlighting how investors are paying a significant premium for its future prospects compared to typical tech companies. While Palantir could prove to be a dominant player in a world where AI is even more prevalent than it is today, the company's current valuation suggests that investors are betting heavily on its future growth. This introduces a huge amount of execution risk. Personally, it's not a risk I'm willing to take. By investing in companies with less demanding valuation metrics, I'm protecting myself against losses. It may be worth considering at a cheaper valuation. The post £10,000 invested in Palantir stock 2 years ago is now worth… appeared first on The Motley Fool UK. More reading 5 Stocks For Trying To Build Wealth After 50 One Top Growth Stock from the Motley Fool James Fox has no position in any of the shares mentioned. The Motley Fool UK has no position in any of the shares mentioned. Views expressed on the companies mentioned in this article are those of the writer and therefore may differ from the official recommendations we make in our subscription services such as Share Advisor, Hidden Winners and Pro. Here at The Motley Fool we believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. Motley Fool UK 2025 Sign in to access your portfolio