Energy bills: One-off £200 support payments set to begin

One-off £200 payments to help people in Northern Ireland struggling with rising energy costs will start being made next week.

Communities Minister Deirdre Hargey said the scheme would open from Thursday 10 March.

People who are eligible will not need to make an application.

They must have been in receipt of one or more of five qualifying benefits during the week beginning 13 December 2021.

The Department for Communities said the qualifying benefits were:

Payments will be issued automatically to individuals, rather than households.

The scheme had been agreed by the executive in January.

Ms Hargey said payments would be made to about 280,000 people who were "finding it harder to cope" because of soaring energy prices.

This scheme is separate to a previous emergency fund that opened earlier this year to help people needing help with fuel payments.

The department said that scheme has so far paid out more than £1m, with almost 11,000 people eligible for the support.

The SDLP's Mark H Durkan welcomed "overdue clarity" on when people would receive the payment but said it was regrettable people did not receive it during the cold winter period.

"Families have been crying out for this support for months, we have just come through a very cold period and now as the weather is beginning to turn people will finally get this money," the Foyle assembly member said.

"While it will help people in the short-term we have seen from the rising cost of heating bills that it will only be a sticking plaster approach at best.

"The crisis caused by inflation and soaring bills for everything from food to fuel is showing no signs of slowing down and people will likely be bearing the brunt of it for months to come."

Separately, Ms Hargey welcomed the "speedy progression through the assembly" of legislation she proposed which will extend some of the local mitigations to welfare reforms indefinitely.

The Welfare Supplementary Payments (Amendment) Bill received support from assembly members last month and reached its final stage on Tuesday.

It means benefits claimants who would have been affected by the so-called bedroom tax will continue to get top-up payments so they will not lose money.

Under the bedroom tax, also known as the spare room subsidy, people who receive welfare payments would have had their housing benefit reduced if they had one or more spare bedrooms.

However, in 2016 Stormont ministers agreed a time-limited, Northern Ireland-specific package providing financial support to people who would otherwise have been affected by the tax.