MANCHESTER United ace Harry Maguire stunned holidaymakers last month, when he showed up for a family break at a Haven holiday park in North Wales.

Despite being on £190,000 a week, he shunned the typical footie holidays of Dubai and Ibiza for Presthaven Beach Resort near Prestatyn – where 4-night holidays cost from £49.

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Harry, 31, and his family, including wife Fern, stayed in a plush Diamond Lodge, costing from £495 for four nights, and enjoyed an action-packed few days doing things like swimming, roller skating and a high ropes course.

Like most other Brits, I was surprised to hear that a well-paid footie star stayed at a Haven holiday park, and couldn’t resist going down to copy his holiday – so last weekend my six-year-old daughter Mabel and I holidayed exactly like Harry Maguire.

Not only did we stay in a Diamond Lodge like the Man United star and his family, but we signed up for the same activities he did.

The caravan was definitely celeb-worthy. There was a huge marble kitchen with all the mod cons, as well as a matching bathroom and en-suite.

With hipster lighting, floor-to-ceiling windows and a 40-inch TV, it was nothing like the caravans of my childhood. I was shocked that you could even fit a giant corner sofa and eight-seater dining table inside.

And I felt a bit like a WAG doing my make-up over the matching his ‘n’ hers sinks in the chic en-suite the next morning.

Our first stop on Saturday was the Make-A-Bear class where a friendly instructor taught the kids how to create their own cuddly animal from Haven’s Seaside Squad. 

Mabel excitedly picked Annie the Elephant, then stuffed her tummy with foam, popped a pink heart inside and permanently fastened her zip.

It was a really cute session with games, singing and dancing.

Afterwards, we wandered up to the Creative Studio to paint a ceramic cup and a unicorn. They’re fired in the hot kiln each weekend and cooled just in time to be picked up on Monday morning.

You could spend days trying all of the activities in the studio from slime-making to sand art.

There are even Christmas-themed sessions where you can make a cuddly reindeer or decorate a festive plate.

My little one’s favourite craft was foam clay modeling. She loved covering a ceramic animal with brightly-coloured, sticky beads.

We refuelled with a quick chow mein lunch at Chopstix and to Mabel’s delight, we grabbed ice cream and candy floss from the neighbouring Seaside Shack for pudding.

Guests can use facilities like the soft play, fun pool, mini-golf and parks for free, while activities with specialist equipment like bikes and roller skates come with a small fee.

We hired a two-person bike and had great fun exploring the site and cycling down to the wide, sandy beach.

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While she still had plenty of energy afterwards, I’m not a match-fit footie player, so she ran around in the soft play, while I sat and watched with a cuppa from Costa.

There’s a full schedule of evening entertainment with family-friendly pantomimes, discos and games – and harry Maguire joined his family for an evening of bingo.

But my little one was finally shattered from her action-packed day of activities, so we switched the electric fire in our lodge on and cosied up on the sofa in our PJs. 

We ordered meals including a Papa John’s pizza using the Haven app, which delivers anywhere on-site for no extra charge.

There were plenty of eateries to choose from including Burger King, a traditional fish and chip shop and a family-style pub.

On Sunday, we joined an aqua jetting class where you grab onto a handheld jet and whizz across the water.

It looks really tricky, but Mabel, who was the smallest child in the group, was happily zooming around the pool with everyone in minutes.

In each session across the weekend, I noticed that the staff took care to ensure quieter kids felt included.

Haven Holiday Costs

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IF you were thinking about going to Haven this summer, here’s a helpful breakdown of the costs.

Accommodation

• Standard Caravan: £150-£300 per week (off-peak) / £400-£700 per week (peak season)
• Luxury Caravan/Lodge: £400-£600 per week (off-peak) / £800-£1,200 per week (peak season)

Food and Drink

• Self-Catering:
  • Groceries: £50-£100 per week (depending on family size and preferences)
• Eating Out:
  • On-site Restaurants: £10-£20 per meal per person
  • Local Restaurants/Pubs: £15-£25 per meal per person

Activities and Entertainment

• On-site Activities:
  • Swimming Pool: Free (included in holiday cost)
  • Kids’ Clubs: Free (included in holiday cost)
  • Evening Entertainment: Free (included in holiday cost)
  • Paid Activities (e.g., mini-golf, bike hire): £5-£20 per activity

Transportation

• Driving:
  • Fuel: £30-£60 (depending on distance)
• Public Transport:
  • Train/Bus: £20-£100 per person (depending on distance and time of booking)

Extras

• Travel Insurance: £10-£30 per week
• Souvenirs/Gifts: £20-£50

Estimated cost for a family of four for one week:

• Off-Peak: £400-£800 (accommodation) + £200-£300 (food) + £50-£100 (activities) + £50-£100 (transportation) + £50-£80 (extras) = £750-£1,380
• Peak Season: £800-£1,200 (accommodation) + £200-£300 (food) + £50-£100 (activities) + £50-£100 (transportation) + £50-£80 (extras) = £1,150-£1,780

Please note that these are approximate costs and can vary based on specific locations, personal preferences, and time of booking. Always check the latest prices and offers directly with Haven or through a travel agent.

Haven has clearly put huge consideration into designing activities that kids love and that’s why, for us, this trip was better than any fancy cruise or all-inclusive holiday abroad.

And thanks to our stylish caravan, we didn’t even need to miss out on that luxury vibe.

Good morning. Labour’s difficult start to life in office has rightly taken the headlines, as the government’s actions a) have real world consequences and b) will have a bigger impact on the next election in four to five years than anything the Conservative party does.

But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that despite Labour’s difficulties, no poll has yet shown a significant shift in the balance of political forces. Some thoughts about how voters see both Labour and the Tories ahead of the latter’s first conference in opposition since 2009.

Slipping away

Here are the overall scores on the door from the latest Ipsos poll.

Now, some of these matter rather more than others. Some have tended to be more predictive since Ipsos first started polling the UK.

Here’s one that, throughout the time Ipsos has asked it, has been incredibly predictive: which party is seen as more “extreme”. This has been true regardless of whether the winning party was seen as moderate or not. People were not telling Ipsos (or RSL as it then was) that Margaret Thatcher was “moderate”. They did, however, consistently find her to be less extreme than Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock.

We can see a couple of things here. The first is how much harm that Liz Truss’s 49 day premiership and the “Let Rishi be Rishi” strategy (the ill-fated plan at last year’s party conference to pitch the former prime minister as a break with consensus) did to the Conservative party. The last election was not particularly hard to understand: the Conservatives moved away from the ground they fought and won the 2019 election on, Labour moved towards it. As a result, we now have a Labour government.

It should also worry Labour that it is slipping and cheer Conservatives that the Tory party shows signs of recovery on this metric. This stuff does really matter — look, for instance, at the Ipsos “out of date” tracker, usually a pretty good sign of whether people think that a government is getting tired.

As I said, my theory of elections is pretty basic: they are a contest between whether or not the government of the day has managed to make itself seem worth re-electing and if people feel the opposition isn’t a scary prospect. The story of the 2017 to 2020 period is that people often felt like a change, but they looked at the opposition and went, “hmm, not so sure about that change”.

So it matters a lot that in spite of Labour’s recent difficulties, the Conservatives still trail badly on “fit to govern”.

So, that’s the challenge facing the Conservatives as they meet for the next stage of their protracted leadership election: to find a leader who can turn around perceptions that the party is not fit to govern, is not clapped out and behind the times. At the same time, the candidate must not undo the party’s recent progress when it comes to not being seen as more “extreme” than Labour. Oh, and it would be a good idea if they picked someone capable of putting this usually predictive finding into reverse, too:

A tall order for all four candidates as the party gathers in Birmingham for its annual conference.

Now try this

I’m indebted to the Centre of European Reform’s Charles Grant for the suggestion that I give the music of composer Michael Tippett a go and have spent much of my time since the Labour party conference devouring whatever recordings of his I can find. I particularly enjoyed this recording of the Corelli Fantasia, in part because it is very good, but also because it follows three of my favourite pieces by some of Tippett’s contemporaries — Edward Elgar, Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Unfortunately I cannot seem to find it on Spotify, in part because that website continues to be pretty dreadful at finding classical music and jazz. (Far and away the best value streaming service for me is Apple Classical.) However, this very good recording of A Child of Our Time is on Spotify. I will be listening to a great deal more Tippett as I board the train to the Conservative party conference in Birmingham.

For fans of “Lunch with the FT”, now in its 30th year, a special newsletter series sharing a few highlights from the archive launches this Sunday — delivered for free by email.

However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend!

Top stories today

MILLIONS of households are no longer eligible for this year’s winter fuel payments.

However, hundreds of thousands of households could secure the cash if they launch a claim for pension credit before the December deadline.

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In the past, winter fuel payments worth up to £300 were available to everyone aged 66 and above.

However, after Labour’s election victory, Chancellor Rachel Reeves introduced cuts limiting winter fuel payment eligibility to those on pension credit or other means-tested benefits.

To be eligible for this year’s payment, you must have an active claim for the benefits mentioned above during the “qualifying week,” which runs from 16 to 22 September (this week).

Most households automatically receive the winter fuel payment, including those on pension credit.

However, 800,000 households are thought to be missing out on pension credit, which unlocks their eligibility for this year’s winter fuel payment.

As new claims for pension credit can be backdated by up to three months, you can still apply now and qualify for this year’s winter fuel payment.

The absolute deadline to claim the benefit and qualify is December 21.

Pension credit tops up your weekly income to £218.15 if you are single or to £332.95 if you have a partner.

This is known as “guarantee credit”.

If your income is lower than this, you’re very likely to be eligible for the benefit.

What if my income is higher?

If your income is slightly higher than the following rates, you might still be eligible for pension credit:

• Single: £218 a week
• Couple: £333 a week

For example, single applicants might still be eligible if their weekly income is under £235.

And those in couples may still get it if they earn under £350 a week.

Those with disabilities, who care for someone, or who get help with their housing costs could still qualify.

For example, if you claim attendance allowance, the threshold at which you can qualify for pension credit rises by £82 a week.

The benefit is open to people over state pension age who need help with personal care due to a physical or mental disability.

The income you receive through attendance allowance is not counted towards your eligibility for pension credit.

If you claim carer’s allowance, the threshold at which you can qualify for pension credit also rises by £46 a week.

Those who receive help with their housing costs could also still be eligible for pension credit even if they breach the earnings thresholds.

For example, you could get an extra amount to cover your housing costs, such as:

• Ground rent if your property is a leasehold
• Some service charges
• Charges for tents and site rents

The exact amount you could get depends on your housing costs.

However, if you’re found to be eligible for pension credit, it could unlock your ability to qualify for the following extra support:

• Council tax reduction
• Housing benefit if you rent the property you live in
• Support for mortgage interest if you own the property you live in

What about savings?

If you have £10,000 or less in savings and investments, this will not affect your eligibility for pension credit.

If you have more than £10,000, every £500 over £10,000 counts as £1 income a week.

For example, if you have £11,000 in savings, this counts as £2 income a week.

If you are meeting Rebecca Hall for the first time at her 1840s farmhouse about two hours north of New York City, you may accidentally wander into the English-American actor and filmmaker’s overgrown vegetable garden. This is upstate New York, where the sprawling farms are dotted with solar-powered sheds and other oddball additions, so you would be forgiven for mistaking her home for the shed on her property, or even her two-storey artist’s studio, which is not a home but certainly the size of one. She waves me over from the front yard, where she’s been puttering around her six-year-old daughter’s raised flower garden, with her Ridgeback puppy, Stella, trailing closely behind. 

Hall – barefoot in satiny olive-green shorts and a navy striped T-shirt – leads me into her kitchen. The cluttered counter looks a lot like mine: mint-flavoured toothpicks, electric bug repellents, a hardcover copy of Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time. Aside from a modest facelift, the farmhouse has never been renovated. That modernist studio I confused for her house – and the swimming pool, hidden from street view – were big draws for her and her husband, the actor Morgan Spector, when they moved here with their daughter and two cats in 2020. 

“I thought I’d be isolated and never see anyone,” she says. “But our friends come up every weekend, like, constantly.” There’s an open-door policy; parties are always happening. Her mother-in-law lives in a barn next door. “She’s like: ‘This place is ridiculous. You’ve got to work out a system with sheets and towels, and make people wash them, because it’s a hotel.’” 

Hall has a way of holding your gaze when she speaks – and she speaks exceedingly well. Her beauty is hard to ignore, yet barefaced, wearing a cap inscribed with the title of the Robert Altman movie, 3 Women, she exudes domestic ordinariness. A self-described eccentric, the 42-year-old star of this year’s blockbuster Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire insists you’ll just have to deal with “whatever batty version of me it is today”. 

Performance has shaped her identity. Her late father, theatre director Sir Peter Hall, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company; her mother, Maria Ewing, was a gifted opera singer who performed at the Metropolitan Opera. “She had a tremendous joy of life,” says Hall in a crisp London accent shaped by years of shuttling between her father’s home in London and her mother’s house in East Sussex. They separated when she was five. “There was no one more fun to be around than her.” 

Hall made her television debut at the age of 10 in The Camomile Lawn, a hit adaptation of Mary Wesley’s novel. Then, two years into a three-year degree studying English literature at Cambridge, she dropped out. An acclaimed production of As You Like It, directed by her father, followed at 21. Her breakout moment came in 2008, when she played the conventional Vicky to Scarlett Johansson’s impetuous Cristina in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Hollywood felt daunting, initially. But “it felt somehow natural to be working in film”, she says. “Eventually, I found myself drawn to it more than anything else.” 

Despite often playing women on the sidelines, be it in respectable blockbusters (The Prestige, Frost/Nixon) or forgettable indies (The Dinner, Teen Spirit), Hall has carved out a path playing women on the edge. Sometimes they’re unstable newscasters (Christine – based on the true story of the news reporter who died by suicide on a live television broadcast) or successful single mothers with a horrifying past (Resurrection). At other times they are victims of circumstance (as in the play Machinal) or wives mired in pitch-black despair (Animal). Soon she will appear in a BBC drama, The Listeners, based on the Jordan Tannahill novel in which a teacher is haunted by a low hum nobody else can hear.

“If you look at a film like Christine, that performance is so powerful,” says actor Dan Stevens, her long-time friend and co-star in Godzilla x Kong. “It’s drawing on so much about womanhood and the female condition. Some of that is personal to her, and some of it is more societal angst, but it all comes through in a performance that is so nuanced.” 

Hall marks

2008 Vicky Cristina Barcelona

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2011 Twelfth Night

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2012 Parade’s End

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2016 Christine

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2021 Godzilla vs Kong

“I am interested in questions that are so fundamental for all of us,” Hall says of these characters. “Who is to be trusted? What can make someone who is completely together completely disintegrate? What’s the margin that separates a relatively sane person from madness? Any story that engages deeply with these questions is inherently dramatic – and I think oddly contemporary.” 

Acting hasn’t proved enough, though. In 2021, Hall exploded the taboo of “passing” for a certain race with her piercing film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, her directorial debut. Starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, the film won many plaudits and was nominated for a slew of big awards, including at the Baftas and the Golden Globes. 

Last year she shared a completely different side to her portfolio, with the revelation of her paintings, a practice she has pursued more privately for many years. Inside her studio, the walls of the airy, light-filled space are covered with canvases of all sizes. A brooding self-portrait rests on the floor. A cluster of snapshots clings to a wall. My eye settles on an impressively detailed painting of two friends laughing. “I’m so not interested in making faces like this any more,” Hall says. “This is kind of where I’m at now.” She nods to a pair of paintings deliciously untethered from reality – theatre audiences racked with emotion. “It’s not realistic any more.” 

Art has been an outlet for Hall since her school days; she would draw faces while sitting in the back of the rehearsal room at her father’s theatre. “My dad would give me a choice,” she says. “‘Do you want to be with a babysitter or do you want to come to rehearsal?’ I liked to be able to capture some kind of emotion. And then, when I got older, I found that a really interesting tool for acting.” 

The confinement of 2020 prompted “a go with oil painting”, she says, adding she was always inspired by taking pictures of friends, which she would later frame and use as a starting point for a painting. “I like photography, I like the idea of seeing a frame of something, but to me, if they’re not moving it’s less interesting.” 

Finally, she began sharing her work on Instagram. “There’s an immediacy to her paintings that I’m drawn to,” says her friend, the folk-rock musician and painter Ian Felice. “It’s as if they’ve been conjured out of thin air.” Their success, he says, “often relies on a simplification of form in order to arrive at the deeper meaning of a subject; a lyrical articulation of colour adds intimacy and emotional charge.” 

Hall is not yet represented by a gallery. When asked what she loves about the process, she says it’s the “freedom of painting feeling”. Self-expression is what drives her: “I don’t do well unless I’m quiet and in my head and creative in some capacity for a chunk of the day.” When she paints, it’s incredibly solitary. And the process is fluid. “I can be in the space where I just get a canvas out and have some paints left and just paint something,” she says. “If I can’t think of anything, I’ll paint these pod people.”

She and Spector – a star of HBO’s The Gilded Age – have been together nine years. They have worked together four times, most recently in the 2017 play Animal. “We have that conversation of weighing up,” says Hall, describing how they try to balance career and family. But still, “I have a strong sense of: ‘I must give up everything and only be there for my child, and how am I meant to do this? How the hell can you be an artist and be a decent mother? It’s impossible.” 

She has been thinking a lot about motherhood recently. Passing positioned her for her next project, Four Days Like Sunday, which she hopes to start shooting next summer. Loosely based on her relationship with her mother, Four Days offered Hall some catharsis when Ewing died in 2022. “She passed away in January, and the script came tumbling out of me some time in July,” she says. “It was my way of writing a love song to certain aspects of my childhood as well as the not-much-loved ones.” 

Growing up, Hall often found herself playing the role of her mother’s caretaker. “She had a lot of anxiety, issues with depression, and sometimes the weight of what she did as an artist was too much for her to actually get out of the house.” Attending a “very, very English, very, very posh” all-girls boarding school full-time from the age of 13 offered Hall a slight reprieve, though she was acutely aware of her outsider status among her peers. 

“It was like: ‘Who is this girl with this mother, who arrives with her entourage of queer amazing-looking friends, with their floor-length black leather trench coats and sunglasses and red lipstick?’ And everyone else there was driving a Range Rover.”

Her mother – who obsessed over outward appearances to the point of telling Hall exactly how to wear her hair – did little to assuage Hall’s growing anxiety about her own identity. “My sense of her background was really confusing,” says Hall. “There were times when she would say to me things like, ‘Well, you know we’re Black.’ And I’d go, ‘Huh? Well, what does that mean? Do we have relatives? What’s my cultural heritage?’ And I would ask again. And she would clearly present it to me in a way that was like: ‘Don’t ask me anything else about it.’ And so I wouldn’t. But then I’d try, gently at another time, and she’d say, ‘Oh no, I don’t know. I think actually maybe Native American, I don’t know.’” 

The revelation of her mother’s true heritage – Hall’s maternal grandfather, who was Black, passed as white – brought her own into focus. “If you come from a white-passing family… unless it’s open and history has kind of processed it, you just inherit shame. The narrative you’re told about your Blackness is that it’s not to be spoken about, you’ve gotten away with it because you look white, so you don’t talk about this, and it’s only shameful. And anything that’s in any way Black, you don’t go there.” 

The film raised awareness of Nella Larsen and her novel, a story Hall holds up there with The Great Gatsby and the other great works of American literature. Ultimately, however, she was most proud of the fact that it provoked a long overdue conversation within her family. “It meant that this thing, this secret that was kept even until the 2020s, could be released,” she says. “It ended up being very healing, at least for my mother and I.” 

Walking back toward her house, I ask Hall whether she ever discussed her desire to direct with her father – the man responsible for bringing the first production of Waiting for Godot to London, whose role in British theatre was so profound that, on his death in 2017, the National Theatre released a statement saying his “influence on the artistic life of Britain in the 20th century was unparalleled”. No, she says wistfully. “I would love to have that conversation with him now.” She has “zero interest” in directing theatre. “For me, the fun of being onstage is being an actor.” 

The control freak in her doesn’t like the fact that as a director of a play you’ve got to be able to walk away. “In a film, you’re crafting exactly what anyone is looking at, at any time,” she says. “I think to be able to do that on the stage is a very particular skill. I would rather find the frame, and fill it with the image I know is going to create a kind of feeling.” 

Hall also loves fashion, and has become a regular on certain front rows, recently at Loewe’s men’s SS25 shows. She’s experimental on the red carpet: wearing a scarlet bustier gown by Erdem or the beaded Bode bra and trousers she wore  to promote Godzilla x Kong earlier this year. The Brooklyn-based fashion stylist Laura Jones has worked closely with Hall since 2014. “She certainly has fun with it,” says Jones. “She has an adaptive approach to clothing, following her creative instincts and where she’s at in her life at that time.”

That ability to follow her instincts is something she hopes to impart to her daughter. “I think that’s a big part of my parenting with her,” says Hall. “That there’s no right answer. She can be whoever she wants to be. We just try and celebrate all the possible eccentric ways there are of being in the world.” 

For now, Hall’s world is here in New York: a six-hour flight to California, where Spector grew up, and seven hours to London. When she wakes she often turns on BBC Radio 4 and leaves it on all day. It keeps her company as she writes, paints or gardens with her daughter – and shops compulsively online, she laughs. “My whole life I’ve shifted from one place to the next, and I feel anchored here in a way that I never have in my entire life,” she says. “This is like the dream situation, and I can’t foresee myself ever leaving it. But I don’t know. If it happens, it happens. I’d be all right with it.”  

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Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel “shares the aims” of a US-led proposal for a ceasefire with Hizbollah, after officials in Washington reacted with frustration to his insistence that Israel would continue striking the Lebanese militant group with “full force”.

US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday put forward a proposal for a 21-day ceasefire in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the hostilities between Israel and Hizbollah spiralling into a full-blown war.

US officials said the call for the ceasefire had been co-ordinated with Israel, and a diplomat said the US had expected Netanyahu to take a positive stance on the deal on his arrival on Thursday in New York, where he is due to address the UN General Assembly later on Friday.

But instead, after a string of far-right members of his government had criticised the proposal, Netanyahu said, after landing, that Israel would continue striking Hizbollah and not “stop until we achieve all our objectives — first and foremost the return of the northern residents to their homes securely”.

In a statement released by his office on Friday morning, Netanyahu said that Israel “shares the aims of the US-led initiative of enabling people along our northern border to return safely and securely to their homes”.

“Israel appreciates the US efforts in this regard because the US role is indispensable in advancing stability and security in the region,” the statement continued, adding that discussions between US and Israeli officials would continue “in the coming days”.

Israel has stated one of its war aims is to ensure that Israel’s northern border region is safe enough to allow more than 60,000 people displaced by Hizbollah rocket fire to return to their homes.

US officials hope the truce would allow time to negotiate a more durable ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah, and also put pressure on Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas to accept the terms of a ceasefire-for-hostages deal in Gaza.

Two people familiar with the situation told the Financial Times on Thursday that the US was hoping that Netanyahu would use his address to the UN on Friday to announce that Israel’s war in Gaza was moving to a new phase, which might persuade Hizbollah — which has insisted that it will not stop firing at Israel until the offensive against Hamas is over — to agree to a temporary truce.

But amid a chorus of criticism from Israeli politicians of the plan, Israel continued to strike targets in Lebanon on Thursday, including carrying out a strike in the southern suburb of Dahiyeh that killed the commander of Hizbollah’s aerial operations, Mohammed Srour.

The strike came amid a massive escalation of Israel’s operations against the Iran-backed group, during which it has assassinated a string of commanders, and launched an intense bombing campaign in Lebanon which has killed more than 600 people and displaced 90,000.

The hostilities continued on Friday morning, with the Israeli military saying that Hizbollah had launched 10 rockets in the direction of the northern port city of Haifa.

During the night, the military said that Israel’s Arrow air defence system had intercepted a surface-to-surface missile which had been launched at the country from Yemen.

MARTIN Lewis has revealed how you can stop your energy bills from rising next week and whether they will go up or down in 2025.

The consumer champion featured as a co-host on ITV‘s Good Morning Britain yesterday morning.

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And the MoneySavingExpert.com website founder used his platform to reveal how households can save money on their energy bills from October 1 when the new price comes into effect.

The new price cap, which affects about 28million households, will see the average family’s bill rise to £1,717 from £1,568 a year – a £149 hike.

But, Martin said, you can beat the hike by locking in a fixed-rate energy deal which is lower than the price cap.

Responding to a viewer question on whether they should lock in a fixed tariff with Octopus Energy for 15 months, he replied that it could save them money.

He explained this is because wholesale energy costs, which is what energy firms are charged, are falling so there are fixed deals on the market cheaper than the price cap, which was decided in August.

“Energy is going up (in price), it’s not going down,” he said.

“It’s going up on the first of October. It’s likely to come down a tiny bit in January but still be a lot more than it is now.

He added: “Bizarrely, energy prices are going up if you’re on the price cap, but the cheapest rates available if you are going to switch (and fix) are coming down.”

The consumer champion went on to reveal some of the best fixed deals currently on the market will be up to 9.4% cheaper than the new price cap coming into effect on October 1.

The advice came as he revealed what is predicted to happen to energy prices from 2025 based on wholesale costs.

The consumer champion said while energy bills are expected to rise by around 10% from next week, they will fall by 2% in January then a further 1% in April, based on predictions from EDF.

Bear in mind though that these are just predictions for what will happen to energy prices and aren’t guaranteed.

How to get help with energy bills

Locking in a fixed-rate energy deal ahead of prices rising next week is one way to cut the cost of energy.

There is a host of help on offer to cover costs over the colder months, including the Winter Fuel Payment and Warm Home Discount.

Both schemes are means-tested though, which means you will have to be on certain benefits to qualify.

But, in total, they are worth up to £450 which could massively help.

If you are struggling to cover the cost of your energy bills or have fallen into arrears, you might be able to get a free grant.

British Gas, ScottishPower, EDF and Utilita all have schemes offering customers up to £2,000.

You also might be eligible for help with energy bills via the Household Support Fund (HSF) which is worth £421million.

The new round will run from October until March next year, but many councils are yet to announce what type of help will be on offer.

However, in previous rounds, local authorities have given households in need energy vouchers, supermarket vouchers and free cash.

Contact your local council, which you can find using the Government’s online council locator tool, to find out what help is on offer.

It’s worth checking if your energy firm has any targeted support on offer based on your circumstances too.

For example, Octopus Energy is handing out 20,000 electric blankets to customers in need this winter.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories