MSE's Cheap Energy Club: Discuss & feedback

Gerry1

nic_c wrote: »

Surely
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications-and-updates/consumers-receive-automatic-compensation-switching-problems

states it is live and people have posted on here when getting the compensation

Good heavens, NO ! On Planet Ofgem things like Brexit and Crossrail are hypersonic, and even glaciers break the speed limit.

They started muttering about this with an open letter way back in Dec 2017. Your June 2018 link referred only to mere proposals; Ofgem then hibernated until Nov 2018 when they said that they would get A Round Tuit. (Beware: it's a TL;DR that's guaranteed to cure even the worst insomnia.) They kicked the can down the road with lots of wordy Drafts, Consultations, Phases, Statutory Instruments and other fun things, and then muttered about reaching the sunlit uplands in 'late summer 2019'.

It was not to be: Ofgem dropped the ball by deciding NOT to introduce automatic compensation if a final bill is more than six weeks late. Compensation for delayed refunds all became rather meaningless because energy companies could just keep saying that 'Your Final Bill Is At The End of the Rainbow'.

One of Ofgem's Golden Rules is 'When In Doubt Have Another Consultation', so they duly did this, and it closed on 1 Nov 2019. They'll decide what to do in November or December 2019, and then they'll have a final Statutory Consultation (the Golden Rule again !) and then they'll publish a SI and the Joint Committee will get A Round Tuit and consider it 21 calendar days after publication, and then there will be a two-month implementation period. Phew...

So Shangri-La may be reached in Spring 2020. Or it may be further delayed... Faites vos jeux !

Edit: Beaten to it by Consumerist !