Don't Pay UK

[BowdonUK]

Some people won't be able to afford to pay their bills.

There is a tipping point in society. Prices can't keep going up indefinately, which is how most companies operate.

As the cost of living increases we're looking at the slow collapse of society. The poorest will be hit first, and those with tight cash flow issues next.

 

[Doobedoo]

It’s important to acknowledge that it’s not just us it’ll affect most if not all of Europe, even the US and Sri Lanka doesn’t even have enough money to purchase fuel, the people set upon the presidential palace and forced the president to flee the country. We haven’t even started it’s still warm and the oct price cap hasn’t risen yet. The preverbal hasn’t even hit the fan yet.

 

[jpaul]

Don't disagree with your sentiment, just a matter of fact they can now officially be called a UK company, even if it was done for corporate tax reasons and made no difference to their operations.

makes no difference for uk windfall tax anyway as that's applied on their uk EEZ/200mile extraction profits, not clear if 50%+ profits from trading attract that either.
and foreign countries can similarly apply windfall taxes.

it hits private companies and even then it's aimed at the wrong private companies. The issue is the likes of Shell/BP not overcharging while the likes of EDF, British Gas still have to buy the energy at whatever the market dictates so the real villains here wont be touched.

uk supplier are still complicit (not your friends) they set up futures/hedged purchases from their parent companies ..
(wink wink) will you deliver this amount of gas at the cap price during Q4, so that supply is put aside limiting product availability for others.

 

[Zenduri]

uk supplier are still complicit (not your friends) they set up futures/hedged purchases from their parent companies ..
(wink wink) will you deliver this amount of gas at the cap price during Q4, so that supply is put aside limiting product availability for others.

You do know the government set regulation in place that energy suppliers have to buy electric and gas 12 months in advance if they are over a certain customer base to ensure supply so the energy suppliers are having to buy overpriced energy in the current market from the generators/ energy resources extractors.......

Too many people in these energy threads talking about things they dont understand or are misinformed on

 

[Doobedoo]

You do know the government set regulation in place that energy suppliers have to buy electric and gas 12 months in advance if they are over a certain customer base to ensure supply so the energy suppliers are having to buy overpriced energy in the current market from the generators/ energy resources extractors.......

Too many people in these energy threads talking about things they dont understand or are misinformed on

In a sense then people are going to be charged prices this winter that were paid for last year when the wholesale cost was nowhere near where it is now?

Or is it different are they just reserving the supply but not paying the rate?

 

[chrcoluk]

Some people won't be able to afford to pay their bills.

There is a tipping point in society. Prices can't keep going up indefinately, which is how most companies operate.

As the cost of living increases we're looking at the slow collapse of society. The poorest will be hit first, and those with tight cash flow issues next.

Indeed, its interesting to read people saying its unsustainable for a government to keep subsidising, but then conveniently ignore that the current situation is unsustainable, its as if they simply believe people can whip money out of thin air to keep paying for rapidly rising bills.

Once we got to a point that large parts of the population are routinely not paying bills then thats a massive problem for any government.

 

[Tom_ed1987]

I've seen some what appears to be much better advice doing the rounds now which is to not just cancel DD & not pay, but to raise a formal complaint, then keep it open & eventually escalate to the ombudsman. The theory being the energy companies complaints departments are very easily overwhelmed, it costs them in terms of KPIs having complaints open, and financially if escalated to ombudsman (no matter how trivial the complaint)

Don't know how true that all is but does sound reasonable

 

[Surveyor]

I've seen some what appears to be much better advice doing the rounds now which is to not just cancel DD & not pay, but to raise a formal complaint, then keep it open & eventually escalate to the ombudsman. The theory being the energy companies complaints departments are very easily overwhelmed, it costs them in terms of KPIs having complaints open, and financially if escalated to ombudsman (no matter how trivial the complaint)

Don't know how true that all is but does sound reasonable

Please explain how not paying and then raising a probably spurious complaint is reasonable.

 

[Tom_ed1987]

Please explain how not paying and then raising a probably spurious complaint is reasonable.

Reasonable as on more likely to actually do something.

 

[dowie]

Reasonable as on more likely to actually do something.

Do what exactly? Magically make wholesale prices go down?

I mean supposing a few people did manage to force a write-off for a few people who have some sort of complaint that plausibly could cause the ombudsman to side with them then that doesn't do anything to change the reality of prices going up in general. Those people, save for their complaint or some temporary compensation or write off of some bill, still need to budget going forwards for further electricity usage... if they've ran into trouble already they either need to reduce consumption or budget better or they're going to run into trouble again.

I guess they're still pushing the adoption of smart meters but I suspect that in the future they might well be used to disconnect people remotely or switch to pre-payment meters without an engineer even needing to visit the property.

 

[chrcoluk]

I've seen some what appears to be much better advice doing the rounds now which is to not just cancel DD & not pay, but to raise a formal complaint, then keep it open & eventually escalate to the ombudsman. The theory being the energy companies complaints departments are very easily overwhelmed, it costs them in terms of KPIs having complaints open, and financially if escalated to ombudsman (no matter how trivial the complaint)

Don't know how true that all is but does sound reasonable

Well Ofgem is the target, so that probably wouldnt bother Ofgem at all. Although clearly a safer option for the billpayer in terms of repercussions.

Most likely what would happen, is they would stonewall the full 8 weeks, (complaints department doesnt need to respond with anything more than a vague looking into it), then the ombudsman receives a higher level of complaints from those who havent forgotten by the 8 week point (I expect by week 8 many will forget about it and not escalate), it then sides with the company and nothing is achieved.

I may have misunderstood you, if you meant doing this on top of not paying, not instead of not paying, then its an interesting one, would companies be ok leaving a unpaid bill as pending not going on credit file etc. due to an outstanding complaint? Not sure.

 

[Simon]

The energy companies are buying gas to sell at a loss and people are going after the energy companies. They may aswell email Putin

 

[Zenduri]

I've seen some what appears to be much better advice doing the rounds now which is to not just cancel DD & not pay, but to raise a formal complaint, then keep it open & eventually escalate to the ombudsman. The theory being the energy companies complaints departments are very easily overwhelmed, it costs them in terms of KPIs having complaints open, and financially if escalated to ombudsman (no matter how trivial the complaint)

Don't know how true that all is but does sound reasonable

Few problems with this.

1) The problem with prices comes from the likes of Shell and BP so opening a complaint with EON, EDF or British Gas for example will do NOTHING to impact the situation and if anything may drive more suppliers to exit the market or go out of business then the same people doing this will be complaining about the SOLR process or the Gov spending their Tax money to bail out another BULB... big Brain move!

2) If people are opening complaints for no valid reason the suppliers will just deadlock it straight away then its down to YOU to spend the time raising the case to the Ombudsman who will most likely reject your pointless case before they even bother to ask the supplier to spend the time and money to respond and document a ombudsman case. If anyone is stupid enough to raise complaints to "screw it to the man" (which ironically they are trying to screw the wrong party here) then i dare say most wont bother to take it to the ombudsman once it's been insta-deadlocked for being a pointless complaint.

Time and time again it just proves that the people coming up with these scheme dont have a ******* clue what they are talking about.

 

[Zenduri]

In a sense then people are going to be charged prices this winter that were paid for last year when the wholesale cost was nowhere near where it is now?

Or is it different are they just reserving the supply but not paying the rate?

Essentially they are guaranting supply at x cost for the next 12 months. What we use today the suppliers paid for a year ago. What you are paying for now will basically be paying off the future supply contract.

 

[jpaul]

Essentially they are guaranting supply at x cost for the next 12 months. What we use today the suppliers paid for a year ago. What you are paying for now will basically be paying off the future supply contract.

but the gotcha , as I alluded, is that the UK domestic companies are not making profits , so the price they pay for the future energy is coincidentally the cap price , not the lesser, futures market cost (which would have yielded a profit to them),
rather, the energy is reserved/hedged (by the parent company) and sold/traded at the higher cap price, so the parent company made the profit.

Yes - Domestic companies could be using profits from the svp customers to offset losses on preferential fixed rate contracts customers


Shell (generation)employees all had a nice 8% bonus, in addition to share buy-back scheme, the bank was just over-flowing, the mechanism to transfer profits to the supplier companies (shell energy uk) seems more elusive , maybe they hold shares in the parent.

 

[dowie]

You do know the government set regulation in place that energy suppliers have to buy electric and gas 12 months in advance if they are over a certain customer base to ensure supply so the energy suppliers are having to buy overpriced energy in the current market from the generators/ energy resources extractors.......

Too many people in these energy threads talking about things they dont understand or are misinformed on

That seems a bit iffy, what regs are you referring to? Like demand varies so they obvs can't buy all that they supply 12 months in advance for a start, I guess they could estimate a large portion of it. It doesn't sound quite right though.

 

[Diagro]

Problem we have is that the Grid is paying power generation plants major money per Mw...

Couple years back a solar park owner may have got £60 per MegaWatt...

Now I'm seeing them win bids of... £350 per MegaWatt!

This is happening all over the UK too... energy suppliers are willing to pay these inflated costs to the generators... so they raise their prices.
In the end we suffer!

 

[413x]

Just had a look on the Facebook group.

So many people haven't a clue how the system works.

One comment

"why doesn't one supplier just lower prices, then everyone would switch to them and they'd all lower"

Facepalm

 

[200sols]

Just had a look on the Facebook group.

So many people haven't a clue how the system works.

One comment

"why doesn't one supplier just lower prices, then everyone would switch to them and they'd all lower"

Facepalm

You see the same sort of comment with the price of petrol etc. People just have no idea how the system works.

 

[bigmike20vt]

to be fair there is no reason why people would know . normal logic for other products for sale would work like that .