Owner of 120-year-old Cambridgeshire butcher shop can’t afford to bake meat pies after energy bills hiked 400%

The owner of a 120-year-old butcher shop can’t afford to oven-bake her award-winning meat pies after their monthly energy bills jumped by over 400 per cent.

Christine Baughen, 71, from Measures Butchers, has been forced to ask customers to cook their own pastries after their electricity price leapt from £898 to £4,220.

The grandmother, who purchased the business with her husband Peter in 1984, thought she was being “scammed” when her energy provider first revealed the hike in December.

Christine said her grandson had a “lightbulb moment” when he proposed that punters cook the meat-filled treats at home from January 24, and shared the idea on Facebook.

Following a huge response from loyal locals, emotional Christine said her pie sales had increased by ten per cent, meaning they could just about earn their crust.

‘900 comments, all positive’

She said: “I thought we may get a hundred or a couple of hundred comments if we were lucky. But in the space of two hours, we had 900, all positive, and others wrote emails.

“They are handmade pies, and we have won lots and lots and lots of awards for them. So to get the response that we did, it actually made me cry.

“In the end, we have sold more pies – not a great deal more as we are working at capacity – but probably five to ten per cent more.

She added: “We are still struggling, and we’re not making a fortune, but we’re just about getting by now. And it did stop us from going under."

Payments risen by £4,000

Christine purchased the butchers in Brampton with her husband Peter 40 years ago by selling everything they owned, including their kitchen fridge.

After he passed away seven years ago, she continued running the business with her family.

Christine had a shock when she got a phone call in December from her energy provider.

She said: “I had a phone call from our electricity provider saying that our payments would be going up £4,220. I first thought it was a scam.

“We were expecting an increase in the price. We’d obviously seen it in the press for months and months, but we weren’t expecting that level of increase, and we hadn’t planned for it.

“We are a small business, and we knew from our turnover at the time it would be unsustainable, we wouldn’t be able to carry on."

‘Lightbulb moment’

Christine spoke with her family about how to raise the funds they needed to keep going, she was reluctant to pass the price rise on to her customers.

Her grandson had come up with the bright idea of seeing if local residents wouldn’t mind cooking the succulent pastries in their own ovens.

"He said, ‘Why are we baking the pies when people are going to take them home and heat them up in an oven again?’ It was a lightbulb moment.”

She said the government needed to cap energy prices at a lower rate if more businesses were to survive.

She said: “For small businesses using a lot of energy, I don’t see how they are going to survive without changes.”