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Everything is energy. That is the uncomfortable truth behind Britain's cost of living crisis. When energy prices go up, everything else follows. Food costs more to produce and transport. Businesses face higher overheads. Household budgets are squeezed from every angle: the weekly shop becomes more expensive, a day out with the family takes up more of the month's pay packet, and meals out become rarer, or don't happen at all. If energy is expensive, life is expensive.

New exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for Looking for Growth (LFG) shows that the public understand this more than successive governments. 70% of the British public rank cutting energy, gas and water bills among the top three most effective actions the Government could take to reduce the cost of living, and two in three say that lowering the cost of goods and household bills would help them more than anything else.

This should not surprise anyone. Energy bills land on doormats each month, people see prices going up in supermarkets, and they notice when their local takeaway is forced to charge more, or stop an offer. Today's news that inflation rose to 3.4% in December last year only further demonstrates that people are continuing to feel the pinch.

Yet, despite this, the response has too often prioritised consensus in committee rooms and pats on the back at dinner parties over the British people. Too often ministers have reached for short-term solutions rather than making the fundamental changes that will help people across the country now, and in the years to come.

Subsidies and short-term support schemes may have grabbed attention, and even demonstrated the appearance of action in the public interest, but they haven't gone far enough.

The Government's eventual acceptance of all 47 recommendations in the Fingleton Review, which LFG campaigned for, is cause for some long-term optimism. These recommendations, if implemented, would represent the most significant reforms to our nuclear energy sector in a generation and transform Britain's energy security, allowing us to make more of our energy here and reducing our dependence on imported energy.

But the fruits of these implementations will not be felt immediately. The British people also need relief now. Cutting the cost of energy, gas and water would put money back in people's pockets immediately, and keep it there. It would reduce pressure on household finances, and bring down costs on businesses, helping to slow inflation across the economy.

Everything is energy because energy underpins everything we buy, use and do. If the Government wants to show it is as serious about easing the cost of living as it says, if they want to prove they are on the side of working families, they must focus less on appearances and more on outcomes.

The polling shows the public instinctively understands what is needed. In an age where there is little consensus, today's polling is a clear instruction. Only radical action to cut the cost of energy will deliver the change this Government promised.

Dr Lawrence Newport is the Director and co-founder of Looking for Growth, a political movement to end decline and save Britain