Vocal Voices

As another pottery factory closes (and goes unreported).

Last week another pottery in Stoke-on-Trent shut its doors, with energy costs one of the factors.

“Stoke cannot power its kilns with wind and batteries,” said Colin Griffiths of the GMB union about the closure of Royal Stafford, a 200-year-old business. “Wishful thinking means spiralling energy costs are now pushing the sector over the edge.”
Alison Wedgwood, of the family dynasty, is in despair.

“The UK has the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world,” she wrote in an article for the local paper. “I couldn’t believe it when I started looking up the data. The UK’s industrial energy is the most expensive by a mile, not by a few percentage points, but double, triple or quadruple the cost per kWh [kilowatt hour].

"For pottery factories, the price of electricity is 28 pence per kWh in the UK, and it’s 9 pence in France, 8p in Spain and just 7p in the USA. How did this happen? How on earth can our pottery manufacturers compete with that?”

Good question.
I wonder if the BBC or Sky will ever ask Miliband that question? I'm betting not.

Yes but the wholesale price is £0.07 per kw/h and even the "cripplingly" expensive new Nuclear is £0.098 per kw/h guaranteed by contract for difference.

it has very little to do with the actual "cost" of energy in the UK and everything to do with how much intermediaries are charging consumers.

Ah yes, the way the costs were presented suited Alison Wedgwood's agenda even though they were nonsense and have been fact-checked and proved false many times - except by the Telegraph journalists..

Then there was something else omitted in the article from the GMB spokesman. Sales of Royal Stafford wares had fallen off a cliff and the company order book was empty - there was nothing to make and sell. This was mostly put down to the importing of counterfeits and copies These fakes are being sold by undercutting the originals. In recent times Rolex, Burberry, L'Oreal and others have been victims of the same thing.

I don't think there's anywhere near the market for ornaments or fancy dinner services that there used to be. Young people aren't interested. My mum-in-law has shelves.full of the stuff.

Oh well, at least our Royal Worcester "Evesham" table-ware is still being manufactured .......

TheOstrich wrote:Oh well, at least our Royal Worcester "Evesham" table-ware is still being manufactured .......

And.very nice too I like nice crockery myself, but I'm not sure youngsters do. Not much call amongst the generations below us for pretty figurines either, or pottery teapots, or animal figures for people to collect. That's bound to affect the companies who make them.

And today we find that the energy cap will rise by 6%, or twice the rate of inflation. How lovely.
I wonder whatever happened to that £300 off we were all going to get?

cromwell wrote:I wonder whatever happened to that £300 off we were all going to get?

The £300 was promised by the end of this parliament, not immediately. We might have to wait, and it might never happen - but it could.

The 6.4% increase in the cap is down to global wholesale costs, not UK inflation, it is just the way it is. Unfortunately suppliers see it as a target and they all aim for it, however, some experts, such as Martin Lewis, are telling us to "fix,fix,fix" to save money. But gel this, spot market forecasters are saying that the price will dip in the next few months due to what might happen in Ukraine. Fixing looks like madness at this particular time especially as the weather warms up.

The cap could fall to 5% or lower in July so anybody fixing now would save diddly-squat, if that.

For those of us paying monthly by card (not DD) a tracker is a better bet.

Strange how Miliband fulminates over gas prices but never mentions the billions per year in green subsidies, which the consumer is paying for.

It's a strange old world.

Figures from the HoC Library show that from 2015 to the end of 2023 subsidies to the FF industry were worth MORE than £20bn than to renewables during that time.

Our governments have been subsidising both sides at the same time for over a decade and we have all paid for them without so much as a peep.

Now that the pendulum has swung there is uproar!

My big beef about green subsidies is that most of them are going to the purchase of EVs and heat pumps (for the few) rather than on the energy infrastructure - the grid, charge points etc, - so that come the time we can transition seamlessly.

Miliband can do sod all about gas prices but he could do a lot more about the necessary infrastructure.