Electricity and gas prices are soaring and tomorrow the energy price cap will rise, with consumers also facing a possible further rise, expected in October.
But there is one silver lining to this cloud because the weather has largely helped to keep heating bills down. This month has been mild on average, despite this week’s cold Arctic air and feeling especially cold today. But even though the Arctic cold will grip the country today, the average for the whole of March will still work out to be unusually mild, such has been the run of unseasonable high temperatures.
Added to that, last winter was also unusually mild. It was one of the UK’s warmest winters in records dating back to 1884 — the eighth warmest winter on record, with average temperatures 1.1C above the norm. It was also the fourth warmest winter for Northern Ireland and Wales, and ninth warmest for England and Scotland. And so there were relatively few frosts this winter and not a lot of what can be called wintry weather — ice, sleet and snow. It was particularly mild in western regions, although those parts tended to be far gloomier under cloudy skies.
The mild winter may seem surprising, especially after the brutal storms of Eunice, Dudley and Franklin in February, but strangely, that violent bout of weather was a symptom of mild westerly air streaming across the Atlantic on a powerful jet stream.
Such a mild, wet and stormy end to winter was very much driven by events in the tropical seas of the Pacific, where a La Niña has been in full swing. Added to that, the winter warmth was helped by powerful winds racing around the stratosphere over the Arctic, which helped to restrain freezing Arctic conditions from flooding down into the UK.
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This mild winter was also underpinned by a trend for warmer winters over recent decades, with fewer frosts across the UK. And to emphasise the warming trend in climate in this country, the top ten warmest years for Britain have all occurred since 2002.
