Capped tariff -- backdoor nationalisation

[Deleted User]

Advocates of re-nationalisation forget one important truth. All these suppliers have a market value. If the Government wants to re-nationalise them, then it usually has to pay well above market value to tempt shareholders to sell. The days when democratic Governments signed Requisition chits are well gone. I doubt that our Chancellor has the means to borrow even more £Bns.

Railways and PFI contracts are different beasts. All the Government has to do is wait for the end of contract date. No doubt the contract will have some clauses about paying for the existing depreciated assets but nothing about payments for the parent company.

[Deleted User]

2010 said:

stewie_griffin said:

2010 said:

Mrs T sold off the energy companies to create competition but now most of the big six are foreign owned.

I know it’s only a minor point but aren’t half of the current big 6 suppliers British owned (OVO, BG and Octopus).

Generally the "big six" are regarded as:

 British Gas, EDF Energy, EON, Npower, Scottish Power and SSE.

And generally we are, after all these years, back to where we were before she sold them off.
The vast majority of the country are on the capped tariff but instead of being supplied by the local electricity board and BG, as pre- sell off, we are supplied basically the same tariff by a mish mash of different companies.

Which was the ironic point I was making.

But isn’t SSE OVO, and nPower are E.ON?

[Deleted User]

As posted earlier, as ‘not for profit’ suppliers were amongst those to fail what makes you think that a Government-run energy company will fair any better than one in the private sector? Government run bodies tend not to be innovators.

Alnat1

@wittynamegoeshere Around 25% of households have never switched their energy company so letting the customer decide might not work as well as you imagine.

wolvoman

The current lot are undoubtedly inept, but Labour can’t get away that easily.

Energy extraction requires decades of forward planning. All the new nuclear plants that the Blair, Brown and Cameron governments approved are nicely coming on stream now to provide oodles of cheap, carbon-free power.
Thank goodness for that foresight, imagine the mess if they hadn’t done so?

Miser1964

It's laughably simplistic for Beer Starmer to talk about a nationalised power supplier. Is he really aiming to take over all nuclear, renewable, coal and gas-powered generators, the National Grid, regional DNOs and the various suppliers who provide billing to consumers into a single organisation stuffed with pen-pushers? It would be as costly and bloated as the NHS!

As Consumers, we see Suppliers come and go, mostly because these billing companies got their contracts wrong between purchasing from wholesale suppliers and consumers. Basically as prices rose they couldn't fund the margin calls on the contracts they'd taken out used borrowed money. 

michaels

[Deleted User] said:

Advocates of re-nationalisation forget one important truth. All these suppliers have a market value. If the Government wants to re-nationalise them, then it usually has to pay well above market value to tempt shareholders to sell. The days when democratic Governments signed Requisition chits are well gone. I doubt that our Chancellor has the means to borrow even more £Bns.

Railways and PFI contracts are different beasts. All the Government has to do is wait for the end of contract date. No doubt the contract will have some clauses about paying for the existing depreciated assets but nothing about payments for the parent company.

That may not be true, if the govt had not brought in the freeze the odds are the big players might have gone broke due to massive non-payment by their customers at which point their value might be zero a bit like when we took over the insolvent banks.

Doesn't unfortunately address the issue that anything run by the state is inefficient, run on behalf of the employees and suffers
under-investment because there are always more politically attractive alternatives.