4 Comments

• Stuart Mitchell 18th Oct '11 - 6:17pm

  “here is Chris Huhne on the action he is taking over energy prices”

  No he isn’t – he says nothing about action on prices, because he isn’t planning any.

  He has nothing to offer the 45% of households who are already well insulated. If they’re struggling to pay their bills now, they’ll be struggling even more in the very near future.

  Even those households who *can* benefit from new insulation will see the efficiency savings wiped out after the next couple of double-digit price hikes. So in about 18 months such households will be back to square one, finding it just as difficult to pay their bills as they do now.

  Meanwhile – and this is the bit that really winds me up – internet-savvy switchers will continue to get some respite by finding the best deals, while befuddled old folk (the people who really *need* the best deals) carry on paying through the nose.

• Rebekah 19th Oct '11 - 9:58am

  I do wonder why we have Ofgem at all! If Ofgem’s remit is to REGULATE the energy industry (and thus their pricing policy) what on earth are they doing? They are certainly NOT regulating anything as far as I ccan see. This is an example fo an institution which is not fit for purpose. Does anyone else have any concerns about the purpose of Ofgem?

  We talk of the “big six” energy companies – if, for example, there is one cost for the “raw materials” for electricity or gas – i.e. the sourcing of the energy, why is there such diversity in the cost to the consumer? Why are companies allowed to play fast and loose with gobbledegook about different Tarifs and pricing mechanisms. An essential utility such as energy should not have all these variations on a competitive basis because you can be sure that, if one company puts up their prices, the others will follow like sheep and no-one is doing anything about it!

  It’s all very well Chris Huhne and others telling us what we, the customers should be doing, it’s the companies supplying the energy which need to be tackled. None of our members in government will have any worries at all about how to pay for their heating bills this winter – they are all well of, unlike many of us!

  I am on a so-called “green” form of electricity – I have a ground source heat pump in my home. I am now paying more for my electricity than I was when using storage heaters and that’s saying something. Most of the other residents in my estate, where everyone has the ground source heat pumps, have switched theirs off because of their extortionate energy bills and have gone on to other forms of heating.

• Chris 19th Oct '11 - 12:52pm

  Coincidentally I have just received a 15-page booklet – everywhere dense in tabulated figures – from my electricity supplier entitled “Your energy prices.”

  I feel it would take several hours, or perhaps more realistically several days, to get to grips with all the numbers and to work out which tariff would be cheapest for me. I also have a suspicion that if my supplier wanted to, it could give me that information at the click of a button. Why not simply introduce a legal obligation on the energy companies to notify the consumer which tariff would be cheapest for them?

  In fact, why not set up an official – gov.uk – price comparison website and oblige the energy suppliers to provide the information on usage necessary for each consumer to make the comparison? Or are we such free marketeers these days that this would be an unwarranted interference in the suppliers’ rights to fleece and swindle at will?

• Squeedle 19th Oct '11 - 1:16pm

  It’s been announced today that in a study that thousands of people die a year in the UK due to fuel poverty. And the answer to these people is to insulate (if they cannot afford fuel how can they afford to insulate) and change tariffs (bearing in mind many poor/elderly don’t have access to the net to do this)? This government is even more out of touch and heartless than the last.

  We have reached a situation where executives and shareholders are making record profits and dividends while thousands of people die because they cannot afford heating. Is this right, in 2011, that we allow energy companies to make profits at the expense of actual human life? How can Mr. Huhne, or anyone else, defend the system we have now?

  These companies should be brought into public control, removing profit from the picture. I am not happy for people to profit when there are others dying because they cannot afford proper heating. We, as a country have our priorities all wrong if we cannot guarantee heating to all of our most vulnerable members.