Tag Archives: E.ON

Britain, Energy, Environment, Government, Politics, Society

Concern over energy firms refusing to pass on price cuts…

ENERGY BILLS

Intro: Millions of energy consumers on fixed deals will lose out

Millions of energy consumers with fixed price energy tariffs will not get a £50 reduction in utility bills as promised by David Cameron and George Osborne. A pledge was given this week in the Autumn Statement that electricity bills would be cut following the decision by the government to roll back some green levies.

The energy giant E.ON has announced that more than one million of its customers will get a reduction of only £12 – or 23p a week.

EDF is taking the same line with its one million fixed rate customers, who include many pensioners and families. Npower, SSE and Scottish Power may follow suit.

The Prime Minister, Chancellor George Osborne and Energy Secretary Ed Davey have made repeated pledges in their efforts to protect customers by rolling back environmental charges.

Mr Osborne said this week: ‘There’s going to be an average of £50 off people’s bills … We are absolutely insistent that this is going to be brought in.’

The smaller reduction of £12 covers the Government’s decision to switch funding of the Warm Homes Discount – a subsidy for poorer families – from energy bills to general taxation. The rest of the decrease was expected to come from changes to the Energy Companies’ Obligation Scheme, a levy applied to all bills to raise money for energy-saving measures for poorer households.

However, the element of the reduction is not being passed on to customers on fixed tariff deals by some companies.

In contrast, British Gas, the largest of the ‘big six’ suppliers, announced that all tariffs and payment methods will get a reduction of £53 from January 1.

A spokesperson for Consumer Futures, a campaign group, said: ‘The message has been that people were going to save £50 on their energy bill, but it seems a fair chunk of people will not get that. This sort of behaviour is not going to do anything to reassure customers … People feel confused and angry about their energy bills. This latest development just adds insult to injury.’

The spokesperson added: ‘I think in the current climate, bearing in mind how people are struggling, the right thing to do would be to apply the full reduction across the board. That is the expectation that the Government has created.’

Following the Autumn Statement, E.ON immediately announced a price rise of almost £60 a year for customers on standard tariffs. The changes will take effect from January 18.

The provider says that cutting the bills of fixed price customers by only £12 was justified because many of these people were already on relatively good price deals and tariffs.

EDF took a similar line and said its short-term fixed deal is some £90 a year cheaper than its new standard prices.

Related:

Standard
Britain, Google, Government

Government sets out a discussion paper on how the census might be replaced…

THE DEMISE OF THE TRADITIONAL CENSUS?

Every ten years Britons and UK residents are required to complete a lengthy census form. Issued by the Government, it takes a lot to make the prospect of completing the form appealing.

A suggestion has been made that Google’s vast stores of data could soon help replace the laborious task of manually filing a compulsory questionnaire.

Internet search engines could be used as a source of cheap information on citizen’s lives, interests and movements, according to a government paper.

It could spell the end of the national census, which was first conducted in 1801 and has been carried out every ten years since, apart from during the Second World War.

It aims to cover every home in the country but the last census – the 52-page bulky document in 2011 – missed out three-and-a-half million people. It cost almost half a billion pounds, a price the Treasury considers far too high. But the possibility of abolishing it in favour of information taken in part from controversial internet multinationals risks deep rows over privacy and David Cameron’s ostensibly close links with Google executives.

The company is suffering major damage to its reputation following is slowness to curb inappropriate content and its failure to pay more than minimal taxes in Britain.

There also remain questions over its close links to Mr Cameron, some of his aides, and other ministers (including Labour MPs).

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has been working out ways of replacing the census with ‘administrative data’ from NHS, tax and benefit records, the electoral register, school and university rolls and other public sources.

But officials are also eager to use information from the private sector. ONS documents have canvassed the idea of tapping into companies with databases each covering more than ten million people.

Firms mentioned include Tesco, the E.ON energy supplier, Thames Water, and Nationwide. The idea of using Google and other search engines to replace the census was raised in a document produced by the Government Statistical Service. Its objective is to look ‘Beyond 2011’, the Whitehall programme for finding an alternative to the traditional census.

Part of the document’s remit is to look at ‘alternative data sources’ which include sources like internet searches or transaction data and information collected and held by commercial organisations.

One example of how this could work is through Google Trends, a publicly-available website which shows the most popular searches broken down by subject and location.

It could be used to find data on migration by, for example, checking the number of searches for jobs in Britain made in Romania.

Google insists it would never sell third party information.

Standard