Standing charges

tasscat

Hi, apologies if this has been raised before but I'm new to this! I've just been in touch with my energy supplier, Shell, as my fixed tariff ends next week and I wanted to get details of the variable tariff I am being moved onto because I can't get another fixed one (for obvious reasons). My unit costs are rising, as expected, but my standing charges for electricity are going up from 18.07p a day to 26.46p, and on gas they are increasing from 11.9p a day to 26.11p a day. I queried this with the customer services agent but he couldn't explain why they putting standing charges up - am I a bit dim, I thought that standing charges just cover looking after meters and supplying fuel to my home, surely these things are staying as they are, it's only the cost of gas and electricity that are rocketing? Is Shell really going to have to do more to keep my meters maintained and to pipe fuel to me, or is is just yet another way to profit from consumers? 

EssexHebridean

You wait until you see what's going to happen in April... 

Seriously - there are several other current Standing Charge threads on the board which will explain -  but the upcoming steep further increase in electricity SC is largely as a result of the huge and unprecedented cost of the SOLR process which ensures that customers of failed energy firms aren't just left without supply. 

Curiousgirl1

there’s there are several threads on here for this exact same thing. I suggest you have a read and it should answer your questions 

MWT

This is asked and answered several times a day at the moment, you'll find other similar threads within the top 2 pages

Short version is for electricity the large rise in the capped standing charge is due to the recovery of the costs for the SoLR protection which resulted from the many supplier failures.

For gas, your original standing charge was a long way below the capped level and I would guess was on a fixed tariff where the supplier had decided to reduce them to entice new custom. The capped level for the gas standing charge has hardly gone up at all, it just feels like that for you because your previous standing charge was artificially low...

... but, the rates you quote are not the ones you'll be on from April which is where the large rises are happening, so you can expect another increase I suspect, and what you have seen so far is just your previous reduced rates catching up with the September price rises, not the April rises still to come...

wild666

tasscat said:

Hi, apologies if this has been raised before but I'm new to this! I've just been in touch with my energy supplier, Shell, as my fixed tariff ends next week and I wanted to get details of the variable tariff I am being moved onto because I can't get another fixed one (for obvious reasons). My unit costs are rising, as expected, but my standing charges for electricity are going up from 18.07p a day to 26.46p, and on gas they are increasing from 11.9p a day to 26.11p a day. I queried this with the customer services agent but he couldn't explain why they putting standing charges up - am I a bit dim, I thought that standing charges just cover looking after meters and supplying fuel to my home, surely these things are staying as they are, it's only the cost of gas and electricity that are rocketing? Is Shell really going to have to do more to keep my meters maintained and to pipe fuel to me, or is is just yet another way to profit from consumers? 

Once a fixed tariff ends then the user is placed onto the SVR ( standard variable rate) unless they have chosed another fixed rate deal so the rates for electric, gas and the standing charges will all increase to the SVR. Then on 1/4/22 the SVR will increase again by 54% to between 32.15p & 51.62p for the SC, 26.86p & 29.64p for electric and 27.22p SC and 7.226p & 7.517p for gas depending on what region you're in.