Centrica (BG) calls for Octopus being prevented from new customers

debitcardmayhem

Hmmm https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ban-octopus-taking-customers-says-104709460.html

QrizB

debitcardmayhem said:

Hmmm https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ban-octopus-taking-customers-says-104709460.html

Well, quite. At the moment (in the absence of any actual evidence) it looks like sour grapes.

Octopus might not have £115 per customer (about £800M, for 7M customers) in the bank, but Ofgem say they have agreed a plan to get there and OFGEM are monitoring their progress towards the target.

debitcardmayhem

Sour grapes indeed, what about their CS not very good as evidenced on this forum.

QrizB

debitcardmayhem said:

Sour grapes indeed, what about their CS not very good as evidenced on this forum.

BGs CS is woeful, but Octopus aren't anything like as good as they used to be.

MattMattMattUK

So just a point on this, Ofgem wants suppliers to aim to keep £115 per customer in the bank for financial resilience, for Octopus that is around £850 million and could well be a billion next year, that is a huge amount of money to have to keep sat around being inactive, rather than say being used to buy future deliveries. Rather than forcing suppliers to be in a position where they are able to weather a period of many months of being forced to sell at a loss it would make sense for the regulator to not do that again, which realistically means that the price cap needs to be revised far more frequently. 

Netexporter

Octopus have done more to advance the energy supply market in 8 years, than BG and its predecessors have done in 80 years.

BG was formerly the largest supplier because they were gifted the majority of the market by the way privatisation was done and ably assisted in hanging on by Ofgem being a revolving door for former Big-6 executives..

wrf12345

Possibly explains why BG has stopped doing variable direct debit on their new accounting system and why they keep ramping up the DD's. Chat does eventually work on BG - or did a couple of years ago but a pain compared to Octopus. They were accurate and timely on the final reading when I left them, unlike some of the total crooks out there. I would not willingly go back to BG as it was a constant hassle to stop them upping the DD, especially when they tried to make out it was for my own good.

ka7e

Centrica is making a fuss about this possibly to distract from the fact that it is planning to sell off UK gas stockpile to reduce losses at it's storage facility. They are asking for government help as the site has lost £26m in the first half of this year, after making a  £53m profit last year (boo-hoo).

Swipe

You'd have to be mad to join British Gas. I'd rather sign up to Utility Warehouse over them.

marlot

I thought people might find this amusing ...

"The owner of British Gas has called for rival Octopus Energy to be banned from taking on new customers amid an industry spat over new cash requirement rules.

Chris O’Shea, the chief executive of Centrica, claimed new financial resiliency requirements were not being properly enforced as he accused the regulator Ofgem of “criminal” double standards.

He said suppliers who were not meeting the new capital rules already should be prevented from accepting new customers until they do so amid fears they may pose a “systemic risk”.

This would include Octopus, which overtook British Gas to become the UK’s biggest supplier of gas and electricity in January."

masonic

marlot said:

I thought people might find this amusing ...

"The owner of British Gas has called for rival Octopus Energy to be banned from taking on new customers amid an industry spat over new cash requirement rules.

Chris O’Shea, the chief executive of Centrica, claimed new financial resiliency requirements were not being properly enforced as he accused the regulator Ofgem of “criminal” double standards.

He said suppliers who were not meeting the new capital rules already should be prevented from accepting new customers until they do so amid fears they may pose a “systemic risk”.

This would include Octopus, which overtook British Gas to become the UK’s biggest supplier of gas and electricity in January."

It looks like someone has spat their dummy out. But it looks like there is backpeddling abound, as the quoted text no longer appears in the diatribarticle. Neither does the accusation against Ofgem. Not sure what it has to do with TE. One issue they aren't implicated in.

Edit: NVM, I see this is quoting from a newer article linked here: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6619879/centrica-bg-calls-for-octopus-being-prevented-from-new-customers