Welcome to the Money blog, Sky News’ consumer and personal finance hub. Today: in our regular Money Problem feature, we speak to someone left at the side of a motorway for hours, who was only offered £8 back by the RAC – until we got involved. Plus, a look at food inflation.
Tuesday 26 August 2025 09:03, UK
By James Sillars, business and economics reporter 
We’d had four days of record closing highs for the FTSE 100 heading into Tuesday’s trading after the Bank Holiday shutdown.
But there’s now a sharp pullback in play globally for stock markets.
It’s being put down to renewed concerns over US central bank independence after Donald Trump said he was to fire a Federal Reserve governor over alleged mortgage fraud.
Lisa Cook, who denies there is cause to dismiss her, was a Biden pick for the Fed’s board – part of the panel to vote on interest rate decisions.
Trump has been pushing for rate cuts to help US growth but his calls have been falling on deaf ears to the extent that he has long wanted Fed chair Jerome Powell out of the way.
If Cook were to leave, and the president replaces her, Trump appointments would have a 4-3 majority on the board.
The row has unsettled investor trust – given that the Fed is supposed to be independent of White House influence.
As such, the FTSE is 0.6% lower at 9,260.
Declines on the continent have been even more extensive, and US futures are also negative.
The dollar has lost ground against most major currencies, including the euro and the pound. Sterling is trading at $1.3440.
Some long-term US borrowing costs were also higher, reflecting a perception of increased risk.
Market commentators suggest that the Fed issue is exacerbating worries about the outlook more widely, given continuing US import tariffs on most global goods.
Food prices have risen at their fastest pace for 18 months, the latest figures show. 
Surges in the cost of chocolate, butter and eggs have driven the 4.2% rise this month, up from 4% in July, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC)-NIQ Shop Price Monitor.
It marked the highest level since February 2024.
The trade body warned that the fast pace of increases will add pressure to families already grappling with high costs. 
The BRC data comes after figures from the Office for National Statistics last week showed food inflation rose to 4.1% for the month on the back of rising dairy prices, up from 3.2% in July.
Mike Watkins, head of retailer and business insight at NIQ, said: “The uptick in prices reflects several factors: global supply costs, seasonal food inflation driven by weather conditions, the conclusion of promotional activity linked to recent sporting events, and a rise in underlying operational costs.
“As shoppers return from their summer holidays, many may need to reassess household budgets in response to rising household bills.”
Every Tuesday, we get an expert to answer your financial problems or consumer disputes – you can WhatsApp us here or email moneyblog@sky.uk. Today’s problem is…
I was driving from Portsmouth to Guildford when my vehicle suddenly lost power in the fast lane of the M275. I managed to coast to the hard shoulder of an elevated section of the motorway. I called RAC and told them I was not in a safe place, but they took almost four hours to come rescue me and tow my vehicle. While I was waiting, two other vehicles collided while trying to avoid my broken down car. I submitted a complaint and they only offered me a two month extension on my policy (equivalent to £8). Can you help?
Jason
You sent over a very detailed summary of what had happened to you. In short, you registered the breakdown at 4.11pm via the RAC app, but it took almost four hours for you to be rescued.
You called the company repeatedly and were told help was minutes away, but this failed to materialise.
At one point, two other vehicles collided while trying to avoid your broken-down car, further highlighting what a dangerous situation you were in.
When the patrol car did arrive, you told me the engineer said it was “absolutely unbelievable that [you had] been left on a dangerous bend on a high-speed road for almost four hours”. 
You also had to pay £148 because once you were rescued, the patrol car didn’t have enough time left on shift to take you to your final destination, only a local garage, so you had to arrange separately to get your car home.
All in all, this was a pretty rubbish and, at times, scary incident for you. 
However, when you complained to the RAC, you did not feel that the type of compensation offered was appropriate.
You then filed a subject access request and were able to see all the data the RAC held about you. 
It showed that, at one point, a patrol car declined to attend your breakdown, but you were not given an update about this.
The RAC response
I reached out to the RAC to find out what had gone wrong
It said: “While roadside assistance companies come to the rescue of thousands of drivers every day of the year, it’s important to realise they’re not an emergency service and don’t have the legal right to control traffic to protect the scene of a breakdown. 
“As such, they can only attend live-lane breakdowns when the area has been made safe by the police or, on motorways and major A roads, the appropriate highways authority. 
“Only when the scene is safe should drivers contact their breakdown company.”
The company also reached out to you directly and was very apologetic. It told you it had let you down, both during the incident and with the handling of the subsequent complaint. 
Because Sky News had brought the issue to the RAC’s attention, you were told the right people were now aware and would look to make sure this didn’t happen again in the future.
The RAC also offered you £250, which you were pleased to accept.
Who to call if you break down on a motorway
A motorway can be one of the scariest places to break down, and while you would think the first thing to do would be to call your breakdown cover, you should actually call the police. 
Jason had broken down on a particularly dangerous part of the M275 – there wasn’t really a proper hard shoulder, and so a breakdown recovery van would not have been able to stop until the scene had been made safe. This would have been the responsibility of the police.
The RAC says: “It’s vital after breaking down that drivers assess the safety of their situation quickly and thoroughly and take the right course of action to protect themselves and others.”
Here’s what you should do if you find yourself in a similar situation…
What is a subject access request, and how can it help with a complaint?
A subject access request gives you, the consumer, the power to ask a company: “What data do you hold about me?”
Under Article 15 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you have a right to obtain a copy of any information which relates to you, whether this is kept on a computer or in a structured manual filing system.
Anyone can make a SAR, and under UK GDPR rules, the company has one month to locate, review and disclose the information. If they don’t, you can make a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The company can redact certain confidential information, but if you feel it has wrongly been redacted, you can complain to the ICO.
In this instance, Jason was able to see all of the details the RAC held about his breakdown, including information he wasn’t given at the time (such as the patrol car cancellation). 
Although the complaint was not successful until the Money team stepped in, it helped his case significantly. 
His next steps (as we can’t always be on hand to help) would have been to take this to the Financial Ombudsman Service – the RAC has all the information about this on its website.
This feature is not intended as financial advice – the aim is to give an overview of the things you should think about. Submit your dilemma or consumer dispute via:
HMRC received a record number of tax-fraud tip-offs last year, analysis by accountancy firm Price Bailey has found. 
A total of 164,670 reports were made to the tax office’s fraud hotline channels, up from 151,763 in the previous year, the data obtained through a freedom of information request showed. 
HMRC pays discretionary amounts to informants based on a number of factors, such as how much time is saved in their investigation based on the information, or how much tax is recovered.
Despite the record number of tips, the amount it paid out fell 13% to £852,438. 
The government is planning to strengthen the reward scheme to encourage reporting of high value tax fraud and tax avoidance. 
An HMRC spokesperson told Money: “The government is strengthening our scheme for rewarding informants to encourage reporting of high value tax fraud and tax avoidance.
“We value the information we receive and urge anyone with information about tax fraud to report it to us online by going to GOV.UK and searching ‘report fraud HMRC’.” 
There are now more than £103m unclaimed Premium Bonds, with some prizes dating all the way back to the 1960s.
NS&I says the amount of unclaimed prizes currently represents just 0.28% of the £37bn awarded over the last almost-70 years.
Prizes are considered “unclaimed” after 18 months, so gradually accumulate every month, but there is no time limit on claiming them.
“Premium Bonds prize winners receive notifications of their winnings if they have registered their contact details,” a spokesperson said. 
“However, sometimes customers relocate or forget to update their details with NS&I. This can lead to unclaimed prizes, especially for those who opt to receive their prizes via cheque rather than bank transfer.”
See how many are unclaimed in your area on the map below…
Some of the winnings date back to the 1960s – most are £25 prizes, but the value of them will have severely decreased through the years. 
Had £25 been claimed in 1960, it would be worth £500 today, according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator. 
How Premium Bonds work
Premium Bonds are a savings product offered by NS&I but instead of earning interest, you have a chance to win tax-free cash prizes each month.
Each bond (£1) is entered into a monthly draw, and prizes range from £25 to £1m. You can deposit up to £50,000, and the more bonds you hold, the greater your chance of winning is.
But that’s not always the case. Some unclaimed prizes have been for those with virtually nothing in their pots. 
One unknowing winner in the South East has an unclaimed £50,000 from November 2014 – they currently have a balance of £0. 
Meanwhile, someone overseas with just £6 in their pot won £100,000 in February 2007. 
The bonds are billed as an alternative to savings accounts and are backed by the Treasury.
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Each Friday, subscribers get exclusive money-saving tips and features from the team behind the award-winning Money blog, which is read by millions of Britons every month.
Sign up today and this week you’ll find the following in the newsletter:
As always, we’ll also outline the best mortgage, broadband, savings, energy and bank switch deals currently available – as well as giving you exclusive early access to our weekend long read.
So, join our growing Money community – and thanks to the thousands of you who already have.
Thousands of pensioners have claimed back more than £10,000 after being overcharged tax on their pension withdrawals.
Pension freedoms, which came into being from 2015, gave over-55s a range of options over how to use their defined contribution (DC) pension pot.
Generally, people can take up to 25% of their pension as a tax-free lump sum, and the remaining 75% is taxed as income.
However, an “emergency” rate is applied to pension withdrawals, with HMRC assuming it will be the pensioner’s monthly income for the rest of the tax year.
This means that people could be overcharged if they make one-off withdrawals.
HMRC figures obtained by Royal London through a freedom of information (FOI) request show the number of refunds rose 20% in 2023-24.
Around 60,000 pension savers claimed refunds. About 11,700 pensioners claimed back £5,000 or more, including 2,400 who were given refunds in excess of £10,000.
The average refund was worth £3,342.
A handful of people in the UK were given a refund worth more than £100,000.
Clare Moffat, pension expert at Royal London, said: “HMRC recently announced an overhaul of its emergency taxing codes on pensions, which it promises will deliver quicker refunds, but that doesn’t mean people won’t still be charged the higher rate in the first place.”
A spokesman for HMRC said: “Ultimately, nobody overpays tax as a result of taking advantage of pension flexibility.
“We will repay anyone who pays too much because they’re on an emergency tax code and individuals can claim a repayment much earlier if they wish.”

Earlier this year we produced a guide to checking if you’ve paid too much tax…
Have you paid too much tax?
To check if you’ve paid too much tax, you first need to look at your income tax for last year. 
You can do that here – you’ll need your national insurance number, government gateway user ID, and a way to verify your identity, which you can do by using the Gov.UK ID Check app. 
Once you have found out the amount you’ve paid, you can use the government tax checker to see if you might be owed a refund. 
There are several reasons you might have overpaid but some of the common ones are: 
How to claim your refund
This depends on your situation. 
If you are employed or a pensioner, HMRC will usually send you a letter telling you how much you’re owed. 
These letters are typically sent from June to November and will tell you to make a claim online or using the app – which it says is the quickest way to get your money back. 
You will need your government gateway ID to log in. Once you have signed in, select the PAYE section. This will give you a summary of your income tax, and you can update this section with any missing information. 
If you are due a refund, a button will appear telling you to “claim your refund”. Click this and HMRC will pay the amount you are owed into your bank account within five working days. 
You don’t need a letter to go through this process. 
If you are self-employed or have other income, you’ll need to submit a self-assessment tax return, showing evidence of your income and expenses. 
You can do this in the HMRC app by selecting the self-assessment section after logging in. 
We’re back for another week of consumer and personal finance updates here in the Money blog.
The most consequential news that we know about comes on Wednesday as Ofgem sets the energy price cap for October to December – it’s predicted to go up 1%. Money reporter Jess Sharp will have everything you need to know first thing.
Our daily features will return after the bank holiday on Tuesday as we tackle a reader’s Money Problem, then you’ll find Savings Guide on Wednesday, Cheap Eats on Thursday and Mortgage Guide on Fridays.
We hope to see you through the week.
The UK is no better prepared to feed its population during wars, pandemics and climate disasters than before the COVID outbreak, the head of the National Farmers Union says.
With threats to our food supply increasing, Tom Bradshaw says, the UK has a “criminal” dependence on foreign countries to source some of its food.
He warns if Britain continues down this road for another decade, it will be too late to “turn the tap back on”.
“We’re living in probably some of the most volatile geopolitical times we’ve known,” he says.
“If we are worried enough… to be investing more in defence, we should be having the same conversation about food security.”
Bradshaw is one of a number of campaigners and experts the Money team spoke to who are sounding the alarm, including the UK’s former food security ambassador, a public health nutritionist and a director of the UK’s largest greenhouse complex.
With Labour having pledged to treat food security as national security, Money investigates the scale of the problems facing Britain’s food supply and the changes to diets and supermarket shelves its citizens may have to stomach if the nation is to become better prepared.
‘The brown stuff will hit the fan’
The COVID pandemic was the first time in decades that shoppers walked into a supermarket and couldn’t get what they wanted.
Perhaps not since Germany’s wartime blockade has the importance of food security become so clear to the British public.
Footage of Matt Hancock trying to reassure a panicked nation that the shops won’t run out might have faded from memory, but new threats have emerged.
In the past five years, we’ve witnessed major wars in Ukraine and Gaza, an aggressive trade policy overhaul by the world’s biggest economy and numerous climate disasters.
Britain needs to consider what happens to its food supply if the chaos continues at this rate, says Professor Tim Benton, former UK food security ambassador and distinguished fellow at Chatham House.
“Increasingly, it’s easy to imagine a prolonged acute problem that would arise out of some significant geopolitical impact,” he says.
“Governments all over the place are starting to worry about how do you ensure that there is enough food in the country to keep the country going.”
The professor adds: “At some stage, the brown stuff will hit the fan and government will have to decide that it will need to invest in new ways to make sure that this works.”
How self-sufficient is the UK?
Last year, the UK produced 65% of the food it needs, exported 9% of that and imported the rest, according to Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
That’s down 13 percentage points from the height of British self-sufficiency, 78%, in 1984.
Since the 1980s, politicians have handed responsibility for food to the free market to save money, says Benton.
Food companies themselves have moved to fragile, just-in-time supply chains, while consumers shop more precariously too, often visiting the supermarket every day rather than filling up a larder.
When Benton warned Theresa May’s government against these trends in the Climate Change Committee’s 2017 risk assessment, he summed up their response as: “We don’t need to worry about food security because the market will sort it out.”
But since Brexit and the pandemic, reality has sunk in at DEFRA.
“You were right to be worried,” Benton recalls a DEFRA official telling him at a meeting in 2021 as he prepared an updated report.
“There is a lot of thinking going on in DEFRA, and that is the absolutely necessary step,” he says.
“We are much better placed now to act quickly, but we are not far enough along that road.”
The government has allocated £11.8bn to food production this parliament, according to a DEFRA spokesperson.
It has also extended the Seasonal Worker Visa Scheme to address labour shortages in horticulture.
Britain’s Achilles’ heel
“Our Achilles’ heel is really fruit and vegetables,” says Benton.
Britain grows just 15% of its own fruit and 53% of its vegetables.
It’s much better at producing meat, potatoes and wheat, but calories alone aren’t enough without the vital micronutrients found in horticultural products.
A major long-term shock to imports could lead to malnutrition that overwhelms the NHS, says Benton.
Bradshaw, of the farmers’ union, asks: “Why are we less than 20% self-sufficient in fruit? That is criminal.” 
Farms cover 70% of British land, but some 85% of it is dedicated to livestock – two million hectares on their feed alone, the World Wide Fund for Nature found in 2022.
Just 1% of farmland is used to grow fruit and vegetables, DEFRA figures showed the following year.
“When you look at foods that are absolutely a core part of a healthy and more sustainable diet, for example fruit and veg and seafood, we are highly dependent on other countries,” says Rebecca Tobi, public health nutritionist and senior business engagement manager at the Food Foundation.
In a world where food is dictated by market forces, that’s partly the fault of shoppers.
“We’ve got used to more exotic diets,” says Bradshaw.
“We expect strawberries on the shelves 365 days a year,” he says, despite the growing season lasting eight months.
British sweetcorn can only be produced for six to eight weeks of the year, onions for 42 weeks and broccoli between May and October.
And that’s just the food that can be produced here in the first place.
“We have developed a liking for things, like pineapples, that we’re never going to grow,” says John Walgate, chief executive of the British Growers Association.
“Bananas are a staple fruit – they’re not going to grow in the UK any time soon.”
Households purchased more bananas than any other type of fresh fruit in 2021 and 2022, according to the most recent UK Food Security Report.
It’s a sign of how dramatically eating habits would have to change should Professor Benton’s warning of a major, prolonged shock to UK food imports become a reality.
But that’s not all down to picky eaters.
Growing pains
“Growing – it’s one of the riskiest businesses you can do,” says Walgate. “It really is not for the faint-hearted.”
Take an apple: A tree is a 20-year investment, but contracts with retailers are usually much shorter, meaning growers don’t know what market will exist for their product when it’s ready.
Retailers can also find cheaper options abroad because the cost of energy and labour in the UK often outstrips savings on transport.
External investors are hard to come by because the climate is increasingly unpredictable, meaning returns are uncertain.
“As growers, you can have a good year if the weather’s good or you have a bad year if weather’s bad. You’re not in control of everything,” says Rob James, technical director at Thanet Earth, Britain’s biggest greenhouse complex.
Thanet Earth is a rare example of a grower that is expanding, producing 300 million tomatoes, 33 million cucumbers and 20 million peppers each year.
But the complex technology needed to overcome the industry’s obstacles has cost the company tens of millions of pounds.
They buy gas and use Dutch-inspired combined heat and power engines to burn it, producing heat for the greenhouses, CO2 for the crops and electricity to sell back to the grid.
The 50-hectare site is 70% water self-sufficient, thanks to tech that collects and reuses rain and condensation, and covered in special screens to prevent sun-scorch.
Thanet Earth’s seventh greenhouse, currently under construction, will cost £20m.
Cash for these innovations just isn’t available to most farmers. In 2023-24, produce at 61% of English farms failed to cover the costs of inputs like fertiliser, labour and medicine, government statistics show.
Britons aren’t paying enough to make investing sustainable, suggests NFU chief Bradshaw.
Prices need to be higher or more taxes need to be dedicated to fund government investment and subsidies, he says.
Asked if consumers must accept higher prices for more food security, he says: “Everyone wants everything, don’t they? The world we’ve been brought up in now is that you believe you can have everything and that the hard, realistic choices aren’t being put forward in front of people for them to make in an educated way.”
He adds: “Somebody, somewhere has to be willing to pay.”
A DEFRA spokesperson said farming profits had increased by a quarter over the past year.
They also highlighted the government has appointed former NFU president Baroness Minette Batters to recommend reforms to boost profits further.
Foreign nations feeding Britain
Without capacity at home, Britain looks abroad to make up the shortfall in its food supply – mostly to Europe (28%), as well as Africa, Asia and North and South America (14%).
The chart below shows the 10 nations the UK is most reliant on for food, feed and drink, with the Netherlands, France and Ireland in the top three spots.
While European allies dominate the table in terms of total product value, some of Briton’s staple foods come from further afield, like rice from India, fish from China or apples from South Africa.
Dependence on countries like these risks disruption by trade barriers, geopolitics or extreme weather, the UK’s Food Security Report found.
“A lot of those other countries that we’re reliant on for imports of fruit and vegetables are themselves at very high risk of climate change and water scarcity,” says the Food Foundation’s Tobi.
Brazil, South Africa and Colombia are three of the UK’s largest suppliers of fresh fruit, such as melons and bananas, but all are classed as climate change vulnerable by the Notre Dame Global Adaption Initiative.
A report by the Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems research programme found 54% of the fruit and vegetables imported in 2013 came from nations likely to face high to extremely high water scarcity by 2040.
“When you look at climate change modelling over the next 20, 30, 40 years, it’s very, very questionable whether those places will still be producing food,” says Bradshaw.
In the shorter term, we’ve seen prices for the likes of cocoa and coffee increase this year due to extreme temperatures and drought in west Africa, Brazil and Vietnam.
Between 2011 and 2020, the number of droughts and severe storms tripled across the globe, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
It’s not just temperatures that are out of control. International conflict also threatens food security.
Russian blockades against Ukrainian wheat, a key ingredient in chicken feed, may have contributed to egg shortages in British supermarkets in 2022.
Climate change will only exacerbate security tensions, says Professor Benton.
“If global trade falls apart because of some climate impact, countries will start being more muscular about insuring their food supply,” he says, be it more aggressive trade tactics, blockades or even invasions.
Trading preferentially with allies and not relying on global markets would allow the UK to become more resilient to geopolitical flashpoints.
The myth of self-sufficiency
But that doesn’t mean pull up the drawbridge, says Bradshaw.
“Trade is part of self-sufficiency,” he says. “If you have an extreme weather event here, you have markets that you’re trading with and you can try to look to those markets to help fill the shortages.”
Between 2021 and 2023, vegetable production decreased by 13% due to extremely rainy or hot weather that delayed planting, hampered growth and encouraged disease.
Britain has become more susceptible to weather events, according to Benton.
With private enterprises in charge, food production has leaned toward specialisation, dividing the nation into two halves: Livestock in the West, arable in the East.
“What we have is effectively eggs in two baskets,” says Benton.
No longer do most towns have market gardens, local horticultural enterprises or integrated livestock, he says.
A bad year for one crop is a worse year for the farmer growing that crop alone.
Is eating less meat the price for security?
Eating less meat and more fruit and vegetables would mean more revenue for growers, allowing them to expand domestic production, says Walgate.
As it is, Britons eat 30% fewer fruit and vegetables on average than the government’s dietary recommendations.
“If, as a nation, we ate what dietary guidance said we should eat, that would equate to something like an extra 1.5 million tonnes a year of fresh produce, most of which could be grown in the UK,” says Walgate.
“That would turn the dial hugely in favour of food security.”
Consuming less meat and dairy has “enormous potential” to free up land for other crops, adds Tobi.
But Bradshaw called on the government to liberalise the planning system across the board.
“Whether that be slurry stores on dairy farms, new poultry buildings, reservoirs for horticulture, the system is broken and rather than being an enabling policy, it’s a blocking policy.”
Tax incentives and favourable, government-underwritten loans should also be introduced to incentivise investment, he said.
The government is expanding funding available to farmers through Environmental Land Management Schemes from £800m to £2bn by 2028/9.
These schemes pay farmers to improve food production and environmental resilience.
Another £110m in farming grants have been allocated to trial technologies and innovation.
“It’s not just about pandering to the agricultural lobby and saying we need to increase productivity locally,” says Benton.
“Growing more wheat, growing more dairy, growing more beef, doesn’t make any sense in the world in which we live.
“We could go weeks or months without eating beef, it’s not critical for our functioning the same way as having access to fruit and vegetables.”
Diversifying the fruit and vegetables we grow will make our food supply more resilient to climate change, says Benton.
In this area, Walgate says there is room for some optimism.
Precision breeding legislation is being debated by the House of Lords that would deregulate genetically modified seeds that grow plants more resistant to drought and with longer shelf lives.
“Looking ahead over the next 10 or 20 years, I think food security is only going to become more important as a principle of national security,” says Benton.
“It’s going to cost money, and for governments around the world at the moment, that is quite frightening to think about – intervening in the markets in the name of national security, in a way that will actually pass costs on to consumers.”
Inflation rose by more than expected to 3.8% in July, we learned this week – and it matters for your wallet.
If you’re interested in the economics of why inflation is on the rise again, this analysis by Paul Kelso covers what you need to know…
One of the biggest impacts on households could be mortgages.
Rates have been falling steadily through this year, but will sticky inflation bring a halt to that? Read our weekly Mortgage Guide for more…
At the same time as CPI was announced on Wednesday, we learned that RPI (the Retail Price Index) came in at 4.8% for July – which is potentially bad news for rail passengers.
The annual rail fare hike in England and Wales this year was calculated by using last July’s RPI plus 1%. If the same happens this year, passengers face a 5.8% hike next April.
Here are three more pieces of news that could affect your personal finances this week…
No more stamp duty?
The Treasury is considering plans to introduce a property tax to replace stamp duty, according to reports.
Officials are looking at a potential national tax on the sale of properties worth more than £500,000 instead of stamp duty on owner-occupied homes.
No final decision has been made, but it is thought the move could lead to the introduction of a local property tax to replace council tax and help repair local authority finances.
Meal deal up 25p
Tesco has raised the price of its meal deals by 25p – you’ll now pay £3.85 with a Clubcard and £4.25 without.
How does that compare? Waitrose has the most expensive at £5 for the main, snack and drink combo. Sainsbury’s recently increased its price by 20p to £3.95. Morrisons customers pay £4, the same as Co-op non-members – though members pay £3.50. Asda doesn’t offer a fixed price for its meal deal, instead operating a 3-for-2 system, with the cheapest item free.
Energy bills
The energy price cap will rise by £17 this winter, a major forecaster has predicted before Ofgem’s announcement next Wednesday.
Cornwall Insights believes the cap will rise to £1,737 a year for a typical dual-fuel household in October – a 1% increase from today’s rate of £1,720.
One reason for the rise is to pay for an expansion to the warm homes discount scheme.
Here are a few other posts Money blog readers enjoyed this week…
Every Saturday, we publish our weekend long read – a feature, deep dive or interview that we know will get you talking.
This week, Money feature writer Brad Young investigates whether the UK could feed itself if the borders were shut due to war or another pandemic. It’s a concerning read – do check it out.
We’ll be back after the bank holiday with live updates on Tuesday. 
Have a good one.
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