British Gas 23% gas price rise !! -corrected & increased

insanegloss

I can barely bring myself to comment on this thread, but here goes.

Firstly, it's not the suppliers who have suddenly decided to make this change so don't get irate with them. This has been looked at by the regulator of the industry OFGEM. You need to be aware that with ANY policy change, there are winners and losers and the research that was done, and I happen to agree with, is that customers were 'baffled' by the 2 tier tariff structure and arrays of tariffs and, on the whole, were prepared to pay a bit more in certain circumstances for simplicity.

Now, it also meant there was no longer cross subsidy of the fixed costs from larger consumers to lower consumers, which most would say is fair. After all, simply having a supply carries fixed costs such as meter readers, the gas emergency service, the replacement of meters, the administration across the industry etc, these all have to be paid for somehow. So if a supply has costs attached to it, would you not expect everyone to pay for these as a matter of course, after all that would in my book be the most fair solution? However, the 2 tier system did hide those costs for low users, i.e. if they didn't use anything, they didn't pay anything, but these costs are still there and higher users were paying these, hence the cross subsidy.

So, yes low users are going to be 'penalised', but only to the extent that they will actually be paying the real costs of them being on the energy networks. If you're unhappy with that, take it up with OFGEM, however they are already aware that some people won't like it, so other than that I don't really know what to say apart from find a supplier that has zero standing charges, eg EBICO.

Hank_Marvin

I'm being moved onto standing charge tariff and if i don't move to ebico or someone i will be paying more in standing charges than the cost of the fuel.
So what ever happened to the claim that cutting your fuel consumption was good for your bills??. My last bill/usage was 40kwh gas, 100kwh elec £27 for both Now i'll be paying £23 standing charge for gas and elec a quarter.