Written evidence to be reported to the House
Energy Bill
12:00 pm
Allan Asher: There are some really good features of the competitive market in Great Britain, and energywatch is keen to make them work even better. That includes switching and things like that. However, I think that it is too much to think that it is as good as it could and should be. With regard to some of these key metrics, such as prices, I was looking just yesterday at the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’s website, which publishes very detailed statistics on European prices every quarter. Complicated 80-page reports are published every quarter, and many of the comparisons are quite favourable. However, what really leapt out at me was that the Department’s figures show that domestic electricity consumers around Great Britain are currently paying 15 per cent. above the EU average price, and on this report, we are the seventh cheapest out of 15 countries in Europe. I use that to show that this is with a market that is most vigorously competitive, yet in Europe they are not; Governments still use their utilities as secret stealth tax officers and things like that.
On prices and on switching, as Alastair rightly says, just over 50 per cent. of people have switched—I think it is 52 per cent., which is great—but 48 per cent. have not. The efforts that we have gone to over seven years have been drawing less and less fruit. Only a third of people over 60 have switched, and our efforts to get more are not going anywhere. Many features of the market are just not working. Six million consumers on prepayment meters are paying £200 a year more than they could get on the same company’s direct debit tariff. It goes up worst of all in the north; it is £480 more if you have a direct debit in the north than on the company’s best tariffs.
I guess that, with some of those elements, there are some features of the market—not all, but some—that are clearly not working for consumers, and we should understand that and be prepared in the Bill to do something about it.