Households are wasting hundreds of pounds a year on gas and electricity bills - despite Government efforts to cut energy consumption, the Whitehall spending watchdog has warned.
The National Audit Office (NAO) said that while the Government is currently spending £2.6 billion-a-year on energy reduction programmes, household consumption has risen by 19% between 1990 and 2004. The increase came despite a 19% increase in household energy efficiency over the same period.
While energy consumption has started to fall since 2005, the NAO estimated that households could cut average bills by at least 30% - around £280-a-year for the typical household - if they adopted all the available cost-saving measures.
It pointed to recent surveys by the Energy Saving Trust which found that 71% of households leave electronic appliances on standby, 63% forget to turn the lights off in empty rooms, and 28% leave the heating on when the house is unoccupied.
At the same time, the NAO said that as the growth in consumer electronics, the emergence of more and smaller households and the tendency of people to keep their homes warmer had all helped to offset the gains in energy efficiency.
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