The Treasury announced at 7am on Wednesday 28 October 2026 that standing charges will be removed from gas bills, ahead of Chancellor John Healey's first budget, which he is due to deliver at 12.30pm. The Treasury said the government will ask Ofgem, the energy regulator, to remove the charges in 2027 or as soon as possible after that. Standing charges are currently about £108 a year for the typical household, according to the Treasury. Instead, those fixed costs will be recovered through the unit rate.
The Treasury estimates that the change could save around 60% of account-holding households an average of about £45 a year. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said in a statement that the move shows he is "determined to reform our broken energy market". Healey said his budget would "draw a line in the sand" on energy policy that he said had failed bill payers.
The Guardian's live blog reported that Healey told the broadcaster Martin Lewis he would also like to remove standing charges from electricity bills, but that he described that as "trickier" and likely to take longer. No timetable for electricity has been announced in the material available so far.
The announcement comes before the budget statement itself, so details of how the gas change will be funded and how it interacts with the wider fiscal plan have not yet been set out in the source material. Opposition reaction, including Kemi Badenoch's response after the budget, had not yet been published at the time of the source report.
This dispatch is based on a public report by The Guardian World. We label it reported; a report is not an independent confirmation.
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