January’s big freeze prompts Orbán cabinet into urgent action for the people – updated

The government is taking over additional heating costs resulting from the extreme cold in January, Balázs Hidvéghi, a state secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office, said in a public radio programme broadcast on Sunday.

With January temperatures reaching 15-year lows, Hidvéghi noted that the government had pledged to take over the cost of turning up the heat for 3.3 million Hungarian households. He also said that it was important to consider how energy companies could contribute, pointing to the precedent of sectoral windfall profit taxes.

He added that the government “would not exclude” the possibility of asking utilities companies to take their share of the burden and contribute to making Hungarian families’ lives easier.

Hidvéghi said that the government support for January heating bills applied to households that heat with gas, electricity or district heating. He added that firewood for people in need who heat with wood-buring furnaces was available “practically without limit” as long as the cold weather lasted.

Hungarians pay the lowest utilities bills in the region, with an average household footing a bill of 250,000 forints (EUR 653) a year, compared to bills equivalent to 650,000 forints a year in Slovakia, 600,000 forints in Romania, 900,000 forints in Poland and 1 million in Czechia, he said.

Hidvéghi said a working group was hashing out the details of the government support for January heating bills.

Update – government working group to discuss compensation for above-average heating costs

The government must respond to the force majeure since excess gas consumption in January came to almost 200m cubic metres, a 30pc increase compared to an average January, state secretary of the Energy Ministry Gábor Czepek said on public Kossuth Radio on Monday.

This is why the government decided to cover households’ additional costs resulting from the unusually cold weather, and a working group has been set up that is meeting Monday morning to work out the details, he said. Czepek said the planned measure will affect all 3.3m households using gas for heating and all 600,000 households using district heating.

Click to read our report on last week’s shocking frost data, which plunged Hungary into a deep freeze. And don’t miss the footage of ice-breakers blasting through the Danube to clear vital cargo routes—a sight the river hasn’t witnessed in years.

Featured image: illustration, source: depositphotos.com