Tomorrow, Ofgem is to reveal the amount by which the energy price cap will be raised by.

It is expected to be 82%. It will take the average bill for both gas and electricity to £3000 a year. Before the last raise in April the cap was £1200 on average.

In the space of seven months, it will have almost trebled.

We are told this is a global crisis caused by international energy prices. And, it is.

But how it is dealt with is not the same in every country.

In France, for example, energy bills are capped at 4% for the rest of this year. Imagine if that was the case here.

Instead, we have people genuinely worried they will not be able to afford the bills never mind having any money left to spend on food. A choice between freezing or starving is what some charities are warning.

In Italy, prices are being kept at 2021 levels with a £12bn subsidy. In Spain VAT is being cut to 10% and a price cap cutting bills in half.

While bills are rising in these countries too the price cap seems to be working better to protect consumers than it is here.

Instead, we have the UK government refusing to freeze prices and allowing the regulator, Ofgem, to let prices run riot, making the idea of a cap being there to protect consumers at all so laughable it should have its own show at the Edinburgh fringe.

We have been totally let down by the big energy firms and by governments.

The bosses of the energy companies are completely out of touch with the customers they serve.

A quick glance at the salaries of the bosses at the head of the big firms shows they are earning sums that the rest of us can only dream about.

SSE boss, Alistair Phillips-Davies got a 47% pay rise this year taking his remuneration package to £4.5milion a year.

Keith Anderson, Scottish Power boss, is reportedly on more than £1m a year.

This week a former boss of one of the big six said that financial support from the government needs to be targeted because it was only 15% of the population that cannot afford the increase in bills.

If anyone wishes to respond to his comments, they can send him an email to headinthecouds @cloudcuckoo land.com

One of the reasons France can put the cap at 4% is the state owns EDF Electricite de France.

The government caps the bills and the nationalised energy firm takes a hit of around £7bn.

It is also less reliant on gas than the UK. But in the UK we are not reliant on Russian gas, in the way some other European countries are.

Our problem is we don’t have the capacity to store it, putting the country more at risk from price rises.

The UK has only enough capacity to store gas to last around five days in the winter, while other European countries can stock up months’ worth.

Also, we do not own our own energy companies like they do in France. In fact, EDF is one of the big players in the UK energy market too.

Last week it told this newspaper its tariffs in the UK were £5000 a year.

In France, it can’t charge more than 4% increase but here, from tomorrow, it can ramp up prices by 82%.

It’s not just the UK that has questions to answer, even though energy policy is reserved and regulation is UK-wide.

The SNP said in 2017 it would create a publicly owned national energy company by 2021 but there is no sign of a publicly run energy company.

The First Minister said that it has “not progressed in the way we intended” and said covid had hampered it.

READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon says energy price rise must be stopped as she holds summit with power firms

You can make your own mind up on whether you think we would have had a publicly owned energy company by now had the pandemic not happened.

We will never know.

Nicola Sturgeon also said that a publicly run company would still have to buy energy at increased prices so, wouldn’t solve the crisis.

What we do know is that from October people are going to be looking at bills that will swallow up most of their income. It will leave people in debt. It will leave people with no discretionary spending power, leading to businesses without customers and putting people out of work and companies out of business.

While the biggest economic crisis in living memory for most of the population is coming down the track faster than Boris Johnson leaving to go on holiday, we have no effective political leadership.

The Prime Minister is absent and the only two people who can replace him have nothing meaningful to say on averting this catastrophe.

They want us to believe that there is not a lot we can do in the face of international events and that price rises are inevitable.

But a quick look across the English Channel shows us that is not the case.

Instead of capping the rises at a level that actually helps households, prices will rocket.

CEO salaries are rocketing and at the same time debt will rocket, poverty will rocket and unemployment will rocket.

It is not rocket science. Freeze the bills protect the population.