The Big Switch – the results are in!

Nikki, I am sure we all (well most) appreciate your efforts and you are trying to do your best, but as I said on the other thread, the problem is the Spin that Which? are putting on this is damaging your reputation and stoking the fire. Come clean, own up and say that the energy companies have us all by the balls.

We don’t care about the people who have been too lazy to switch for the past 5 years – that is their lookout. What we care about is the result of a collective negotiation that did not work or save many of us very much. Even an average 5% better than the best publicised tariff would have amounted to about £100 each and a lot more for the non-switchers. What you have got is a saving for the non switchers who are too lazy or have more money than sense and most of them will not follow through with the switch anyway.

I propose another campaign called the “Big Switch Off” where all 270,000 of us switch off our lights, heating, tvs, kettles etc and eat cold food for a week in protest at the prices, customer service, misleading tariffs, unreadable bills etc. This is not easy and we are at the mercy of the shareholders for an “essential service”.

I’m still waiting for my offer email

The mood towards bigswitch seems to have turned quite hostile in the last couple of days. After initially positive media coverage, many recent articles and posts have criticised it as failing to meet expectations. So are these criticisms fair?

One recurring criticism is that with the Co-op deal only being available to 30,000 customers some who signed up may lose out. This is true, but misses the point. The Co-op deal is only available at all because Which? allowed small suppliers to cap their offers at 30,000 customers. The reason for this cap is that some of the smallest suppliers are genuinely very small indeed. The Big 6 suppliers serve more than 99% of the households in mainland Great Britain. Co-op, prior to this auction, had only 25,000 customers. They simply couldn’t cope with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous switches and wouldn’t have taken part in the bigswitch if this cap didn’t exist. I suspect that people who criticise the cap mistakenly believe that there was a choice between the Co-op offering this deal to 30,000 customers or to everyone – when actually it was a choice between offering this deal to 30,000 customers or to no-one. Everyone would prefer it if this deal was available to everybody, but would people genuinely rather it wasn’t available to anyone than that 30,000 households end up better off?

A second criticism is that it didn’t provoke any suppliers to launch new tariffs. This is simply untrue – the fixed term deal offered by Co-op is an entirely new tariff.

Then there’s the criticism that a new First Utility tariff that meets the auction criteria is slightly cheaper at standard consumption. This is true, but it was launched after the auction ended. What’s the complaint here? That Which isn’t capable of time travel? Be reasonable.

And there’s a criticism that an old First Utility tariff is slightly cheaper at standard consumption. Again, true, but it was ineligible for the auction because of its product features – for example, because of excessive early exit penalties. Part of the intent of bigswitch and other collective switching initiatives is to try and force suppliers to offer simpler tariffs. So if you try and baffle consumers with unfair small print, you’re out. Personally, that seems like a good thing.

Commission rears its head. Forty quid times nearly 300,000 sign ups sounds like a lot. And it would be, if all the sign-ups converted into actual switches. But they won’t. Experience of collective switching from the Netherlands and Belgium suggests that perhaps only a third of those who provided consumption data to collective switching sites go on to actually take up the offered switch. And you would be paying this kind of commission if you went via a switching site – you just wouldn’t know about it. Which? is a charity, so it’s not like it’s going to be spending any surplus it makes on dancing girls and landmines.

Some people are currently on a better deal, in most cases because its a discounted fixed term deal that’s yet to run out. Good on you; stick with it.

Some people will have better priced deals available at their consumption level. This is inevitable because everyone consumes different amounts of energy and the absence of much regulation means that suppliers can configure their tariffs pretty much any way they like – so the best deal at national average consumption may differ from the best deal at half or twice that consumption level. But the email you’ll get from Which? will set out how much the bigswitch deal would cost you at your consumption level and will tell you whether there are any alternative better deals. And if there aren’t; don’t switch, you don’t need to.

Finally there’s the accusation that its failed to shake up the market. I don’t agree. We’ve seen an ethical customer-owned small supplier doubling in size overnight. We’ve seen a demonstration that low carbon energy doesn’t have to cost the earth – Co-op’s carbon intensity is less than half of the Big 6. We’ve seen an articulation of the fallacy that prices can only go up; ironically the result and the separate First Utility price cut were announced on the same day that British Gas signalled impending price rises. And we’ve also seen a proof-of-concept – that collective switching can work in the UK. It’ll have teething problems and won’t be flawless – Which? certainly appears to have struggled with the logistics of it and I doubt they’d run it the same way again – but it’s a step in the right direction.

Hi,

Just got my offer. I’m currently with EDF Energy with Online S@ver Version 9. I’ve just done a quick calculation on the percentage increase in the tariffs charged. The electric increase is 58.25% and the gas is 29.34%. Did I just have a very good deal before in comparison to the” Blue +” offer?

John, it indicates my current tariff and the new one with Blue +.

Electric is now 8.12p and with Blue + it will be 12.85p

Gas is now 2.975 and with Blue + it will be 3.848p