Last January the average price of petrol was £1.31 a litre. Today it is around £1.10 a litre, so the consumer is saving around 20p a litre, a saving of £12 every time you fill up your tank. Assuming most people do an average mileage of 12,000 miles a year, they will fill their tanks up around three times a month. So the average car driver is £36 a month better off – that’s £432. And let’s remember that eighty per cent of families own at least one car, and around one third of families own more than one.
I wonder if Ed Miliband will include this in his ‘cost of living crisis’ speeches. With inflation at 1% it increasingly sounds ridiculous to bang on about a ‘cost of living crisis’ which to the average person in the street just isn’t there. Food prices are coming down too, as well as white goods. Yes, it’s true that non oil related energy prices remain high, but let’s not pretend that these costs form a large part of a household’s expenditure – they do not. The average family spends around £1550 a year on gas and electricity, around 4% of an average household’s entire expenditure.
The only real ‘cost of living crisis’ is being experienced by people who rent flats or houses in London and parts of the south east, where rental costs have shot up due to the lack of supply. In 2003 an average family spent about 15% of its income on housing. In 2013 that figure had risen to 21%. Whether that counts as a ‘crisis’ is a debateable point, but it’s housing where Ed Miliband needs to direct his fire rather than say there’s a general ‘cost of living crisis’, because for most people there just isn’t.
Of course, if you’re on your financial uppers, you will be experiencing a crisis, but that’s always been the same. But with more people in work and wages now outstripping inflation I just can’t see how Labour can use the ‘cost of living crisis’ as an election winning argument if it isn’t people’s everyday experience.
