It was in August that the Danish government put a total of 2.5 billion Danish kroner into trying to help the people in the energy price crisis. 411,000 households were paid 6,000 Danish kroner (over 9,000 Swedish kronor) each.
But the issue was disputed, so the then energy minister Dan Jørgensen (S) asked the Swedish Energy Agency to investigate so that the subsidies ended up correctly. And now it is clear that approximately 10,600 households received money on incorrect grounds.
The selection was made based on records that were insufficiently updated. For example, some households were estimated to have high costs due to old, inefficient heating systems, even though the houses had long since been modernized during renovations.
The new energy minister Lars Aagaard (M) consoles himself with the fact that most of the money ended up in the right place.
“The investigation shows that the heating check to a very high degree reached the homes it wanted to help,” he says in a statement according to the Ritzau news agency.
He emphasizes that it is “important to learn” from his mistakes, but that the way the law was designed, it is not possible to demand the money back. Or as the Swedish Energy Agency notes: “The right to a heating check is based on the data sources, not on actual conditions. Therefore, it is not about wrong payments in the sense of the law”.