Government giving out €11m to alleviate energy bill woes

If you're careful with your electricity usage, check your letterbox next week as you might be in for a pleasant surprise.

With bills at an all-time high, the government will, as of Monday, be posting cheques totalling €11 million to nearly all households in Malta to ease the burden of higher energy tariffs.

Finance Minister Tonio Fenech said this energy allowance would go to households that have not exceeded 10,000 units of usage in a year, meaning 97 per cent of them would be receiving some form of help to pay their energy bills.

The allowance, announced in the Budget, will see single-person households receiving €55, two-person households €80, three-person households €105, four-person €130, five-person €155 and six-person €180.

Apart from this, 28,000 low-income households already receive energy benefits that have recently been increased.

Mr Fenech said that for households with average consumption, the allowance would cover the hefty tariff increases of the past few months and for those consuming less than average the allowance could actually work in their favour.

Intended to offset the effects of higher oil prices on utility bills, the government was taking on the burden itself, rather than increasing the cost-of-living allowance (COLA), which employers would have to pay instead.

Explaining the rationale behind the flat rate, Mr Fenech said it was the only socially just measure, as giving allowances corresponding to usage would be tantamount to encouraging people to consume more.

The minister also said that, thanks to the tariff reform, people were consuming less, so much so that the number of households using less than 10,000 units yearly had increased over the past two years. This made more people eligible for the scheme and pushed up the government's original estimate for the allowance up by €1 million.

It is evident that the government has aimed this scheme at all but the profligate. In comments to The Times, engineer Marco Cremona, an avid environmentalist, said that 10,000 units a year amounted to 27 units a day and any more than that would be "extravagant".

While Mr Cremona said his two-person household consumed only 4.5 units a day, he said a normal family's usage would be around half the limit.

"I imagine that someone wasting 27 units a day would have four air conditioners on simultaneously and the pool's pumps running in summer, with the house being fully heated in winter," Mr Cremona said, adding that people who wasted this much were probably too rich to bother.