Scottish Power and British Gas placed the majority of the warrant orders for the 94,000 prepayment meters that UK energy companies forcibly installed in 2022, Entrepreneurng report.
Prepayment meters are typically installed for customers who have historically missed payments by energy companies, and the government has been keen to distance itself from this practice.
The lifting of coronavirus pandemic limits and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused an energy crisis that drastically increased costs and pushed 2 million English homes into fuel poverty by 2022. Forcible installations have drawn particular attention during this time.
In response to worries that laws designed to protect vulnerable households were being broken, the government and providers reached an agreement in February to stop forced installations. This month, the head of the British energy regulator, Ofgem, informed Parliament that the practice will continue to be prohibited until a code of conduct has been developed.
According to the authorities, three companies are to blame for 70% of all forced installations and are therefore “the most overzealous suppliers.” These were British Gas, a subsidiary of FTSE 100 company Centrica; Scottish Power, owned by Spain’s Iberdrola; and Ovo, which took over SSE’s residential energy division in 2019.
The government claimed that Scottish Power, with 24,300 installations, was “the worst offender when taking into consideration their customer base.”
Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, called the statistics “horrifying” in a statement after the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero posted the information online under the title “Not. Good. Enough.”
On Monday, the government’s energy bill assistance program’s energy department also said that 2.1 million vouchers have not yet been used. When Rishi Sunak was chancellor in February 2022, he initially introduced the program, which offered £400 to every household in the UK. Most consumers had their support automatically applied, however, users of non-smart prepayment meters had to manually submit claims after receiving vouchers, frequently by mail.
The final vouchers for March are set to expire 90 days after they were issued, but many people have experienced difficulties getting the assistance. The 2.1 million unclaimed vouchers amount to around £140 million that has not reached its intended beneficiaries, many of whom are presumably among the neediest households in the Nation.
The government reported that there are more than 400,000 unclaimed vouchers from Scottish Power, Ovo, and British Gas combined.
With an average of over 7,500 forced prepayment meter installations per month last year, the numbers available today paint a clear and horrifying picture of just how pervasive this practice had become.
I do not want to outright prohibit prepayment meters because some people may benefit from them, but I am worried that businesses have not been treating their customers fairly during this already challenging winter when the government has tried to assist families by covering about half of the typical household’s energy costs.
In conclusion, the government will be keeping an eye on the results of an Ofgem review to ensure that vulnerable consumers who unjustly endured forced installations get the justice they deserve in the form of redress.
Source: The Guardian
