Don’t Pay:

A thousand new beginnings

All it took was a few people, a simple website and a bit of cash pooled together to print some leaflets. In June 2022, we launched Don’t Pay – and it caught fire.

Barely 80 days later, pollsters estimated that 3 million would stop paying their energy bills on 1 October, when prices were to soar another 80%.

This lead to results. The winter of 2022 was easier for millions of people than it would have otherwise been thanks to the energy bill price cap. This also forced Liz Truss to roll back on her plans to give away billions in tax cuts to the richest in the country at a time of surging inequality, which would have made things even worse.

We didn’t achieve everything we set out to. But it made an important difference. And there’s lots to learn from what went well and what didn’t.

This site is here to keep the memory of the campaign alive. And to collect our reflections and lessons from it to learn from for the future.

What next?

Over the next year, we’ll be closing down the Don’t Pay organising group, the contact addresses, WhatsApp groups, etc. We’ll also be collecting and sharing stories and lessons about the campaign. If you joined the email list, we’ll email you occasionally to let you know when something new has been posted. If something else starts up that you might be interested in, we’ll let you know about it as well. Then after one year, we’ll delete our email list and archive this site.

There is still a lot of work to be done. Inequality in the UK and across the globe is soaring. Landlords are taking billions of pounds of ordinary peoples’ money for substandard housing. Wages are being held down to protect the profits of the rich. And governments and companies are allowing the infrastructure that ordinary people depend on to degrade, while filling our rivers and seas with sewage and warming our planet to the point where it could become unihabitable.

This campaign was always intended to be a short-term project and isn’t active any more. We'll be updating this page soon with information about other things that are worth getting involved in.