MSE News: Which? launches collective energy switching campaign

WestonDave

I think if you ban tie ins, you will lose the discounts and fixes which come with them. No company will offer you a discounted rate for 2 years or a fixed rate for 2 years if they know they are the only ones bound by that contract. The point for the supplier is to match fixed contracts for purchase in the energy markets with fixed contracts to sell to consumers - if they can't rely on the sales its better for their business stability to just buy as they can get and have full price flexibility on sales.

Would be interesting to see if someone could come up with a "Tracker" style tariff where the rate per unit is tied to say average monthly world market prices.

The "Which" idea would be a victim of its own success if it worked spectacularly. If one company ended up mopping up £4bn of energy sales (5/6ths of which would move from the other suppliers) they'd probably put at least one of the other companies out of business at a time when all the experts argue that we need greater competition not a contraction of the market. Competition would seriously suffer if one company was massively larger than the others - the smaller ones would want to lower prices to regain market share, but would need the cash reserves to cover the losses it would make in the process because its lost its profitable non switched customers. At the same time the larger "Which" backed company would have the massive customer base it needs to sustain a price war to the point it starts driving the others successively out of business. In the extreme we end up with one supplier who at that point can tell Which to get stuffed and double prices because there is no other supplier!

As someone has said the £4bn won't come out of overall turnover - it will just be shared out differently, and this scheme if it works could make things a lot lot worse in the long term.

Le73Uq86Uv

That is the whole point they think they are imune from ever increasing price rises, let one go to the wall and it will make the others have a long think about its practices and prices as they could be next.

And I am sure there will be others who would step in and provide a fresh new energy practice.

What Which must not do is sign up to any lockin deal.

Come on Branson give it a thought.

50000 sign up to the big switch in 48 hours

mattcanary

I don't thinkl this is a good idea.

Surely if the scheme is a success then a lot of people will join it and pay lower prices per unit used. This will mean the company achieves lower profits and just increases proces for everyo0ne becasue of this anyway.

It's not solving the problem. The aim should be to reduce proces for everyone, not just for those people thgat sign up to a collective bargaining group.

Le73Uq86Uv

55251 people have signed up so far

Blackdog

I can't see that this has been mentioned before but there is a new collective option ( as far as I know there is already Which and one other). It is called The Peoples Power and it is a community interest company. The fee charged to the power provider for each switch is just £2 so this in turn should mean the cheapest possible price for the consumer. Might be worth signing up as there is no obligation to transfer if you don't like the price they come up with. Also they don't have an issue if you also sign up to the Which scheme and then compare the final price. http://www.thepeoplespower.co.uk/

Yolina

I've registered for the Which? Switch, along with it seems another 156,038 people :rotfl: though given that I'm a low user, I'm not really expecting some incredible deal to come out of it but it only takes a few seconds to fill in the form so I've got nothing to lose really

PennyForThem_2

I have registered as well as nothing to lose by doing so. Great idea - seems to have worked for Holland

serious_saver

I've only just found out about this. The idea is good and I don't see any harm in trying to get a better deal. Who knows it might save me a few quid.