JUST 20 companies have made a staggering £483 billion in profits since the start of the energy bill crisis, while thousands live in cold, damp homes, fuel campaigners have warned.

The End Fuel Poverty Coalition, which tracks companies such as Equinor, Shell and British Gas, reported yesterday that the firms raked in £9bn in profits this year and posted another £77bn of interims.

Recent Ofgem price cap changes have also let suppliers take an additional 11 per cent in profits on every standard variable tariff, the coalition said.

Its analysis suggests that supplier profits allowed through the price cap could amount to £1.2bn over the next 12 months, enough to cover the cost of Winter Fuel Payments for almost all pensioners.

The payments were recently scrapped for all but the poorest pensioners by Labour, leaving 10 million people without support to heat their homes.

Coalition co-ordinator Simon Francis said: “While consumers have suffered in cold, damp homes this winter, energy firms’ boardrooms have been celebrating further bumper profits.

“To add insult to injury, around a quarter of what is spent on heating our draughty properties is wasted, because the fact is that the UK has some of the worst insulated homes in Europe.”

Fuel-poor households are “seeing money fly out of their windows and into the pockets of the energy industry,” he said.

“We are repeatedly told that there is not enough money to provide support for older people with their energy or to roll out comprehensive programmes of insulation. These figures show this is simply not true.

“There is plenty of money in the energy industry, it’s just not in the hands of hard-pressed customers.”

A Warm This Winter report, released in March, had called for improvements in ownership transparency for energy network and transmission firms after it found British households had been boosting the profits of international government-backed funds.

Warm this Winter spokeswoman Caroline Simpson said: “We reckon it’s about time the energy industry stopped lining their own pockets and supported the estimated 8.8 million people that have spent Christmas in cold damp homes.”