This is The Guardian.

Today, the soaring cost of energy and the social catastrophe starting to play out in the UK.

The Guardian

On the first floor of an office building in Brighton, a small team of staff and volunteers are taking calls from the public.

The work for citizens advice, an independent charity offering support to people having problems, making ends meet.

In a normal year, there'd be a steady stream of calls from people wanting help with legal problems or finding a house or paying debts.

But lately, more and more of the calls are about one problem in particular.

How to keep up with energy bills, now and as we approach the winter.

It's very tiring, I think is the honest answer.

Rich Jones and Philo Sullivan are part of the citizens advice team in Brighton and they're increasingly finding themselves on the phone to people who are panicking at breaking point.

Yeah, you can hear it in people's voices at the minute.

People are stretched so thin and it doesn't take a lot to tip them over into getting very emotional at the moment to be honest.

And the person who was helping was a man in his 80s who just broke down crying on the phone.

His wife had died last year, he's almost completely isolated and he was saying to me that he's scared that he's going to have to spend the winter sat in a cafe because he's not going to be able to afford to put his heating on for the whole time.

And lately, the tools they normally have to dig people out of a crisis, like the pockets of money here and there that people can apply for, feel like they're just not enough between inflation, energy bills, petrol costs.

There's just too many things going wrong at once.

I'm sure Phil feels the same, it feels completely inadequate.

I think there is a genuine discomfort to saying to somebody, have you tried getting some extra blankets in, have you thought about keeping the windows closed between these hours of the day and opening them between these hours of the day.

There's an absurdity to it, but it's what we've got left in our bag of tricks.

And when you're faced with somebody who is in that much need and who's that desperate and it's a choice between suggesting those kind of things or nothing,

you do find yourself kind of having to say them.

I mean, I feel very angry every day, I really do.

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