My wife and I make a decent income between the two of us, and we nearly froze to death winter before last! £500pcm+ to keep our house at like 10°C, absolute madness.
I'm from Vancouver, Canada, so everything seemed so cheap when I moved to the UK....except natural gas and electricity. Like I held the lease and had all the utils in my name for a house when I lived in Canada, 14 people, all gamers. And the bills in winter were less than half what my wife and I were paying this past winter.
Single glazed everything, shoddy extension that's falling to bits, and no insulation anywhere, 12ft ceilings and also our boiler is shit. It's a two bedroom Victorian terrace, ground floor. Fighting with Edinburgh Council to get approval for a much needed renovation, but even though the category of listing our home is literally only covers the front facade, our really quite modest renovation plan would "be a detriment to the character of the neighbourhood". Our upstairs neighbour also paid significantly less that winter...but they got approval to rip all their floors up and install insulation and double glazed windows.
Just Edinburgh planning are fickle. We got someone on the wrong day, and they decided, fuck these guys in particular. They are notorious for things like stringing an application along for 5 years for no good reason. We're requesting a formal rejection, a decision was supposed to have been made in January, so we can take it to appeals. Thankfully since we're in a listed building the appeal goes directly to the office of a minister and not back to Edinburgh Council planning.