It is that time of year again.

[TW]Fox;25131486 said:
No, energy companies are private companies which exist to maximise shareholder value. They are not charities.

The problem here isn't the energy companies - they are behaving exactly as a private company should and is intended to. The problem is the concept of having essential national services in the hands of private companies. It leads to this sort of activity almost entirely unless there is a huge amount of regulation in the industry which usually ends up rendering the entire privatisation process totally pointless anyway, for examples of this see the railways.

We must therefore blame the concept of privatisation in the first place and not the energy companies. Or in other words, dont hate the player, hate the game.
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Agreed, and I always like your take on threads. However, I feel the big energy companies should have fingers pointed at them to some degree: it is not a prerequisite of good business practice to batter your customers, especially when the product is essential to life, and they seem to all raise their prices together (thus making the average customer believe there is little point in switching).

Serious question: how are things going to get better for the consumers?
 
mark66 said:
I need to switch suppliers and a colleague has just been telling me how long it has taken for his switch to happen through a switching service that offered him £30 cashback. His advice is to go straight to the new supplier, so you can benefit asap from the new tariff rather than wait 3 months for it to happen.

Anyone got any views on this? Happy to go direct but £30 cashback would also be nice.
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I just switched through Money saving experts cheap energy club. Switched from EDF to M&S Energy and get £30 cashback after 3 months. The whole process took just under 5 weeks and went smoothly.
 
Edrof said:
Serious question: how are things going to get better for the consumers?
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The UK to not be a net importer of energy, or, Source your own elec and gas supplies :)

Saying that though
Green power = higher cost
Nuclear power = higher cost

It's probably better to budget for an annual 8-10% rise in elec and gas bills each year.
 
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Im not a fool, I know companies have to make a profit, I know shareholders want returns, but there has to be a line drawn somewhere, it cant keep going upp and up and up when peoples incomes are virtually static year on year.
 
SDK^ said:
OldCoals said:
The profit per customer is going up though.
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Centrica chief executive Sam Laidlaw told the BBC that the firm's profit margins per household "actually went down"
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Other than to perhaps demonstrate you don't understand what a profit margin is, what is your point?

It is entirely possible for the profit per customer to increase and the profit margin to reduce. This is often what can happen when cost/selling prices increase.

Would you rather sell £10 products on a 10% margin or £20 products on a 9% margin?

The higher your selling price is, the lower the margin needs to be to generate the same profit per product/customer.
 
British gas are swindling thieves. Had enough of them hiking my bills by 10% every year. Switched to a fixed plan with first utility today. I hope BG lose a lot of customers.
 
I love all this talk about switching.

A quick look and British Gas alone and they have 25 tariffs, now lets assume that the big six have a similar amount.

That is over 100 tariffs to choose from!
 
well im in a fixed deal till march 2017 little more each month than the best deal i could have got this year but if price goes up then i will recover that cost
 
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