MANILA — A senior House energy lawmaker urged the government Wednesday to channel fuel-crisis relief directly through electricity bills, arguing that the country’s existing billing infrastructure offers the fastest and most transparent route to deliver cash assistance to millions of ordinary households already straining under record-high fuel costs.
Congressman Atty. Arthur Yap, vice chairperson of the House Committee on Energy and representative of the Murang Kuryente party-list, made the proposal during a hearing of the Legislative Energy Action and Development Council, warning that building a new disbursement mechanism from scratch would only invite delays and fund leakage at a time when households can least afford to wait.
Yap proposed targeting residential consumers using between 51 and 300 kilowatt-hours per month — a band he said captures the core of ordinary household demand.
Those consuming 50 kWh or below are already covered by the government’s automatic lifeline subsidy program, which entitles them to a 100-percent discount on their electric bills.
The rationale for the 51–300 kWh window draws from hard data.
The 2023 Household Energy Consumption Survey placed average monthly household electricity consumption at 266.88 kWh among households served by distribution utilities, positioning the proposed band near the center of normal Filipino household usage.
Targeting this range would reach the broadest swathe of middle and lower-income consumers without duplicating existing lifeline beneficiaries.
The scale of the proposed delivery network underscores why Yap views the billing system as uniquely suited to the task.
Citing the Department of Energy’s EPIRA status report, he noted that national household electrification has reached 25.27 million households, serviced through 121 electric cooperatives supervised by the National Electrification Administration and an additional layer of private distribution utilities.
The government, Yap said, would need to coordinate with a limited number of billing entities rather than attempt direct manual disbursement to tens of millions of individual households — a process that has historically been slow, politically susceptible, and prone to duplication errors.
The urgency of Yap’s proposal reflects the mounting pressure on Filipino consumers.
Fuel prices have surged globally following an escalation of conflict in the Middle East, disrupting oil supply chains and driving up electricity generation costs, transport fares, and basic commodity prices across the Philippines.
The transport sector has petitioned for fare increases in multiple regions, and local government units in some provinces have begun mobilizing their own relief measures as the crisis widens.
In the same hearing, Yap pushed a separate but related intervention: deploying the Maharlika Investment Fund as a tail-risk backstop to unlock agricultural credit at scale.
He argued the fund should not be used as a direct lender but as a last-resort guarantor that absorbs only catastrophic rural credit losses — a structure he said would give commercial banks, rural banks, and foreign debt funds the confidence to extend loans to farmers at viable rates and volumes.
Without such a backstop, Yap warned, lenders either price agricultural loans prohibitively, demand collateral most farmers cannot provide, or remain stuck in limited pilot programs that never reach meaningful scale.
A credible reserve-backed mechanism, he said, would allow credit to move faster and deeper into farm production, stabilizing planting decisions and protecting food supply — a particularly consequential goal as fuel-driven input cost increases threaten to suppress the next planting season.
“The point is to use the systems government already has,” Yap said. “Use the electric bill to deliver fast and visible ayuda. Use Maharlika to create the risk structure that allows private capital to fund agriculture at scale.”