Consumer champion Martin Lewis has warned rocketing household bills could lead to “civil unrest”.
The founder of the website Moneysavingexpert said he feared the consequences of soaring prices, with forecasts that average energy bills will leap again in the autumn.
He told ITV’s Peston programme: “The public mood is desperate, it is angry.
“We may well be moving towards, if we don’t sort this, when those bill rises come in the middle of October to £2,600 in the middle of winter, I worry about civil unrest.”
He called on the Government to “get a handle on it.”.
Amid demands from elsewhere for Chancellor Rishi Sunak to hold an emergency budget, he Mr Lewis said: “They need to listen, and they need to stop people making choices of whether they feed themselves or feed their children.
“And we are in that now.
“We used to have a relative poverty condition in this country and we are moving to absolute poverty, and we cannot allow that to happen.”
The head of business group the CBI said today that tackling rising food and fuel bills would not add to inflation .
Tony Danker told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “You have to help the hardest hit now.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has raised “significant concerns” with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky about rising food prices linked to the Russian invasion.
In a call on this morning, the pair looked at options to “open up critical sea and land supply routes for Ukrainian grain stocks”, and committed to directing their teams to “work urgently on the next steps”, Downing Street said.
Meanwhile, consumer confidence has plunged to a record low in the face of the cost of living crisis.
A report from pollsters GfK found people’s confidence levels - a key of how willing they are to spend money - is now at the lowest level since it began collecting the data in 1974.
