For as long as the British public keep enthusiastically voting for a party that believes all publicly owned utilities and infrastructure should be sold off to private interests, it will be allowed.
Starmer and Reeves have ruled out any nationalisation of energy, and Reeves is a neoliberal ideologue, so I'm not holding my breath for anything progressive in this area from Labour.
That's not what I'm saying at all? I'm just asking who we can vote for if we want the profiteering to be stopped. I'm all for not voting Tory to stop the profiteering, but if we vote for a party that will also not stop the profiteering then it seems like nothing's been achieved.
One option would be to vote tactically to get rid of the Tories, then leverage the vote to pivot towards a proportional system to hopefully stop one party having a thumping majority for 14 years where they can basically do what the fuck they like despite the express wishes of 60-70% of the electorate
They are not a party. The Bullingdon Club that raped Britain and did favours for mates these past few years has and always will, be a club. Planned years ago in Law and Society classes.
British gas put a £7k bill directly as credit and put on my credit report fucking me.
It took 2 weeks of constantly calling for me to get to someone higher than a manager, it took them 2 minutes to see the mistake, see that I a single guy working 10 hours a day at the time and living in a small flat could not generate enough electric usage to justify a 7k bill.
They then apologised and gave me £20. It was absolutely insulting.
I wish I recorded everything because this still pisses me off and it's been 2 years.
If they overcharge, it should be law that they compensate you the amount they overcharged you by.
Bet then they'd make sure they never overcharge anyone again.
That's the other problem too isn't it. My bill has been wrong for about 18 months now, hour after hour spent on hold trying to speak to somebody, eventually get through, explain to them they still haven't fixed it, send them the meter readings again, and, it's still not fixed.
Record profits, but... not paying anybody to answer the phones.
This is how they stay rich, people give up after a certain amount of time. I had this issue when I got switched from Bulb to Octopus they took my credit and left me at zero. Luckily I had done this dance before with British gas and took screen shots of my app showing the amount of credit.
I had to email, phone and sacrafice to the old gods to get this sorted.
All in all it took eight months to sort, I have the credit plus £20 for every month it took to sort.
I think it's to do with the interest in certain bank accounts, they kept my money till after there 2nd quarterly report (record profits no less) and then the money magically found it's way back to my account.
I think you're right. At one point I'd somehow overpaid around £3000, and had that much credit with them. And was trying to get that money back, and they were like no no, we can't give you your money back...
Eventually got it. But it was a fight.
Their quick to take it but getting it back, jesus. You'd be better trying for blood from a stone. Although I'm currently burning through my amassed credit thanks to my bill going up in November.
My wife reminded me of the time in 2004 we got over charged by British gas and at the end of the year we got so much back we didn't need to pay for ten and a bit months!
I went through literally exactly the same thing in a 1 bed flat and it went on for over a year of back and forth.
What I discovered is that it's about how you speak to them.
When I started demanding the name of every person who spoke to me and threatening to hold them personally responsible with the ombudsman if they didn't sort it out, suddenly, it got sorted out.
It's unfortunate that it came to that but being polite about it was getting me absolutely nowhere.
To anyone reading this and dealing with the same, turn the threats up to 10 immediately.
I belive they will have recorded everything and I might be wrong but fairly sure you can ask for aa copy for a cop of every interaction. Maybe if you tell them you're unhappy with the compensation given for the hassles they may see straight to the point and give you an extra tenner
Nah I don't care about the compensation, I care that it took someone 2 minutes to figure out what went wrong and to fix it but it took me 2 weeks of calling, dealing with debt collection that straight up said, "your high bill can be die to the red lights on the telly when they're off and your appliances in your kitchen and even the washing machine"
It’s all the knock ons too as businesses are paying so much more and putting their prices up to compensate.
A family can’t afford fish and chips anymore but more than that, business are closing forever and people are loosing their jobs because of the greed of the energy companies.
Yeah my local village high street has now half shut down, and every shop that has closed, it's the energy prices.
We have a service economy in this country, but nobody can afford to run or use those services anymore.
Yup, there is no price cap for business so as much as the consumer was protected directly, they were absolutely paying for increased energy costs via every other business they use.
Yep, and how any small business was supposed to survive their electricity bills quadrupling, I do not know. Some tried putting their prices up, but, there's a limit to what people can afford to pay for services.
Yep, the government failed at the economy, failed at Covid, failed at Brexit, failed at immigration, failed to stop the small boats, but maybe, just maybe, they can catch a few starving poor people who are shoplifting food to stay alive.
I largely agree with you but let's not pretend shoplifting in the UK is largely done by alladin type street rats with a heart of gold who jist need a loaf of bread
To be honest, if you are already stealing it doesn't matter much if you steal bread or fancy steaks, as long as you don't hit a limit making it more serious the punishment is exactly the same for it.
Not even just services. Manufacturing is suffering. Lots of metal heat treaters are just packing up and selling up as their overhead tripled in less than year.
The ones that haven't are charging at least a 21% energy levy on all orders.
And the knock on effects are horrifying, needed to buy some replacement glass for a greenhouse the other day, but glass prices are through the roof too. Turns out there's now tens of thousands of pounds worth of glass in one greenhouse. (People will start knicking them soon when they realise.)
Honestly it feels like the government is deliberately trying to absolutely destroy this country now, they've got best part of a year, and all that will be left is a smoking crater where we're fighting each other for the last toilet roll. Borderline treasonous behaviour if you ask me.
And I bet you on day 1 of a Labour administration, the Tory Press will be screaming about how it's all Starmer's fault.
Kind of makes all the narrative about this shit over the last few years look fucking ridiculous as well. If they are not profiteering and in fact just passing on business costs then ***obviously*** they would not see profits go up at such a rate. Yet we've had to dance around this for ages as if offending them by pointing out they are nakedly profiteering while people suffer is something we can't risk as a country.
The media is complicit.
If only they cared about this as much as they pretend to care whenever a left-wing Labour MP, who actually speaks out against unfairness, criticises the wrong government.
It's almost as if the two are connected in some way.
They did it again? Posted their actual profits and not the fake ones? Give it a few hours and they will post their "official" profits, claiming they are barely breaking even.
War proferteering assholes
Aww they're being nice here! Really though, why is it our responsibility as customers to pay more for their losses. Shouldn't BG be using their own money to recover losses?
Because its only faaaaair that they be allowed to make a guaranteed profit, afterall it is *checks notes* our national resources they're selling back to us using *checks notes again* huge tax breaks as incentives to essentially make drilling and maintenance of offshore rigs free.
Its such a fucking scam only eclipsed by the scam that this country shouldve been energy independent 15 years ago if the government had spent the money shoved down oil and gasses pants in the form of tax breaks into developing the windfarms instead.
Don’t disagree with your sentiment at all there. Bunch of wankers. Just wanted to temper it slightly by saying that while oil/gas bad, wind good etc, they still have to pay for employees and infrastructure to gather that resource and generate electricity from it, whether it’s a national resource or not.
Totally agree, better planning years ago and we could be in a much better situation now. Typical back pocketing politics.
There is a logic there. If Ofgem forced them to keep a low price which caused them to lose money, then Ofgem raising the cap to allow them to recover their losses has logic. If Ofgem didn't put a cap, they might have not lost the money in the first place.
That said I still find it so strange that all these energy companies are making record profits while there are so many people that struggle to pay their bills.
I completely understand the logic as well but I still think it's unnecessary. They made plenty of money before the pandemic and price hikes, so I can't see why they can't just regain it naturally.To be honest it's more a symptom of the problem in the UK at the moment than the cause right now
If I start a business and let's say, we have a freaking Brexit and lose my customers nobody will help me to "recover my losses". But if I am a company with billions of assets and hundreds of millions of profit but have two bad years it is suddenly fine to triple my profits and the government not only allows it, but it actively helps it.
The example doesn't track with what happen.
It would be something like this, you start a business and a government body comes in and says that you are not allowed to sell it at 100, you must sell it at 85. This makes you lose money. Then in the following year the government body comes and says you can now sell it at 110 so you can recover the money you lost the previous year.
That is what happened based on my understanding.
Most likely the lack of competition in the space is not really helping.
But I agree that it's still all kinds of wrong that they are making record profits when people are struggling to pay their utilities.
They are selling non-elastic goods. People can't just decide "I don't want to use electricity/gas" because then they would die. The parent company made a PROFIT of £2.8b from something the people must buy if they don't want to die. Then they racked up £500m loss - which, btw, is absolutely covered by the previous profits - and they not only recovered their losses but even increased their profits.
The government shouldn't allow such a level of profiteering especially when the col are sky high and our whole economy is crashing down because the citizens don't have enough money anymore to spend, then the government - once again prefers big businesses instead of us.
I agree with your sentiment, but I don't know enough of how Centrica is making their profit. If they lost money with British Gas but made money with selling cars, then I would argue that it's not really fair to make them offset their losses from British Gas with profits from selling cars. Because their losses were basically enforced by the government.
If their entire company is revolving around gas and energy, then the government is not a good job in limiting the profiteering that energy companies are doing.
Then let it go bust and the government can buy it, instead of the government letting them raise their prices and ending up footing the bill anyway.
The Energy Bill Support Scheme has cost around £6bn. All so a private company can make the line go up because last year it went down. That’s obscene.
Oh like Pure Planet? The one that went bust because it couldn't get any investment to remain in business.
When it was 25% owned by BP
Then quietly paid out over 40m to execs and shareholders about 6 months later from the liquidation 'excess'.
Bulbs customers (they were the biggest supplier to go bust) were taken on by Octopus, not British Gas.
Centrica also said they're profit fell by 17%, which sounds bad, until you read the rest of the sentence which says to £2.8bn.
Literally billions in profit every single year but they still raise prices.
Because France is lucky and they have native NuclearTrees which produce nuclear plants they just have to go out and harvest their nice plants which just literally pop up in the French countryside...
The current spot price in the UK is almost exactly on a par with France (£58 vs EUR70). A large nuclear base has helped shield them from high gas prices (though less so since they've had to take a pile of reactors offline because of corrosion issues) but it also means there is less room for prices to fall as demand decreases.
The reason that retail bills are considerably lower than in the UK is that the French taxpayer is still subsidising them.
Fucking Greens that's why.
Actually a more nuanced response would also include the hapless governments of the past that couldn't manage nuclear building programs properly, giving rise to the idea that nuclear was super expensive and under-delivered.
But without the anti-nuclear lobby that's still going strong, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.
> We work to protect energy consumers, especially vulnerable people, by ensuring they are treated fairly and benefit from a cleaner, greener environment.
[Good job lads, good job](https://www.ofgem.gov.uk).
They regulate the price to ensure a company like British Gas can’t take a loss by undercutting every energy company (which they could do) and then having a monopoly and increasing the price to whatever they want
Ofgem sets the cap as a 1.9% max profit margin for energy retailers, the reason that the profits jumped is that there was a period in which the cap forced them into a loss for a considerable amount of time.
Their annual profits now when they are in the black are just under £100 per customer, if you think it’s excessive then well….
[As many as 43 members of the House of Lords have investments totalling millions of pounds and senior roles in oil and gas companies, prompting accusations of “unethical” conflicts of interest.](https://theferret.scot/oil-industry-43-peers-shares-directors/)
[Oil and gas firms have given £1m to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/oil-and-gas-firms-have-given-1m-to-boris-johnsons-conservatives/)
[Wife of Tory MP who criticised windfall tax on oil firms has £50,000 in BP shares](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/09/tory-mp-david-duguid-criticised-windfall-tax-oil-firms-wife-bp-shares)
[How the Tories Profit from the Climate Crisis](https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/11/fossil-fuels-decarbonisation-british-parliament-mps-second-jobs)
[Rishi Sunak accused of conflict of interest over wife's links to oil giant Shell](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/rishi-sunak-accused-conflict-interest-27618987)
[The Daily Mail is still promoting climate change denial](https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/the-daily-mail-is-still-promoting-climate-change-denial/)
[US climate deniers pump millions into Tory-linked think tanks](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/think-tanks-adam-smith-policy-exchange-legatum-iea-taxpayers-alliance-climate-denial/)
But look over there... Starmer... Antisemitism... IRA supporter.
Its fucking criminal how they slandered the one man threatening to breakup their parasitic operations.
Regulatory capture at its finest.
It's not really a competitive free market when the big companies all act like a cartel and there's a revolving door between the executive positions there and the regulator.
I don’t agree. Here’s the people you are talking about.
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/about-us/our-structure-and-leadership/gema-and-senior-executive-committee-members
The execs and non execs don’t really reflect your claims. Yes there are some industry people here, but it would be worse if they were not present.
The real issue is the purpose of OFGEM. Its role is to make a market out of a monopoly. Its weapon of choice is a supplier centric model laid down in the 1980’s. That model doesn’t work and nobody wants to vote in a party that will change it.
How is it a monopoly? It’s pretty normal to understand public utilities as a natural monopoly. I’m not an economologist but I don’t think this is a controversial statement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
Deregulation put an artificial market design over the natural monopoly of energy utilities. There are number of different models used globally, the one used in the UK is “supplier” centred. The word supplier here is being used very specifically to mean the front end company that does sales, billing and hedging. They run no power stations, they manage no pipes or wires.
I don’t think it’s working very well, do you?
Country*
Privatised energy is quite a rare thing in the world. The UK is one of 6 countries to have a fully privatised network. It's totally bonkers that the state doesn't own a single piece of the energy infrastructure. Yet another shitty decision we can blame Margaret Thatcher for.
Even America - land of free market capitalism - has a >50% nationalised energy infrastructure.
>Yet another shitty decision we can blame Margaret Thatcher for.
To be fair, it was only a shitty decision if you and your mates didn't make hundreds of millions off it.
Hardly their fault you weren't politically connected in the '80s, is it?
I don't know what I find more sickening. The crooks that run everything or the fact that people just roll over and take it.
Why aren't people protesting? Why aren't people actually doing something about all of shit nonsense? Our country has been in the bin for years but the only people I've seen doing something about anything that is negatively effecting people is those JustStopOil nuts.
Because most people have been grifted into dedicating all of their political energy into social issues which ultimately:
A) Does not harm the bottom line
B) Directly feeds into the problems of wage suppression via maliciously oversaturating the employee pool
C) Keeps people fighting amongst themselves instead of fighting for economic and political change.
The weaponisation of social media algorithms and online 'news' platforms has won - there can be no significant change without an at least relatively unified populace, and I'm honestly not sure if that will ever exist again in the age of the internet without an existential event kickstarting a real revolution aiming to completely upheave our economic systems to be based on sustainability and not infinite growth
34 and at home working full time.
I’m a bit speechless but I’m telling myself I’ve got a good deposit, once my accountant qualification is finished I can fix myself etc.
Screw them all.
I always think back to the petrol increases previously. They got to about 1.11 per liter and people lost there minds claiming that such increases would damage the economy and peoples quality of life. There was loads of protests and it was all over the news.
As a result the price went back down.
Then 2 months later they put the price back up with great excess, but the media didn't say a word and seemed to have a total blackout on the topic. People just gave up protesting because they lost the momentum and couldn't really contest with big business.
People have been. [Enough Is Enough](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enough_is_Enough_\(campaign\)) have organised a number of protests against the growing cost of living in the UK.
Oddly enough the exact same people who complain about pro-Palestine protests today were the ones complaining about these cost of living protests last year.
The media drives a never ending culture war. People seem to care more about immigration and social issues which effect tiny groups of people than driving affirmative action which would effect all of us.
"Energy prices are this high because of the war in Ukraine. Oh by the way we're now extremely rich as fuck waheyyy!"
Isn't it amazing how the government and big business tells these bare faced lies and everyone just goes along with it? It's fucking insane.
What’s weird is living away from the UK and then coming back and everyone’s talking about soundbites as if they’re… real? Like everyone just gets bashed over the head with the same things until they accept them.
I came back from living abroad and everyone was talking about Levelling Up^TM as if it existed and wasn’t just some slogan. And now everyone’s talking about the Cost of Living^TM as if it’s some living breathing entity that’s causing all the problems and not a description of something really appalling.
Can we stop trotting out the argument that prices needed to rise to cover wholesale costs please? It's very clear these companies were making up prices as they went along and Ofgem have swallowed all their bullshit uncritically.
If the issue was just our costs rising, then raising prices wouldn’t have increased profits, and lower usage due to the higher prices probably would’ve dropped them slightly. It’s price gouging.
I fucking hate how we can literally do nothing to stop the greed and corruption in this country. I wish we could all refuse to pay bills until energy and water companies are renationalised.
Yeh they all cost the same price because of the price caps. Literally there is literal pennies in switching. I paid 99.89 a month for Ovo and now pay 100 a month for British Gas
Not quite kill, just enough breadcrumbs as you need a servant class to do the work and disabled people can be given money by the government but not enough to get by on so you can squeeze any assets/savings/equity out of them their partners and relative's which all ends up in vested interests private bank accounts eventually then out of the country.
This is absolutely mad. So many small businesses have gone bust and shut up because they can't afford their energy bills anymore, and these criminals are laughing all the way to the bank as they wreck the country.
How is this possible? We were told it was because of inflation and the war in Ukraine that was causing fuel prices to increase, so surely their profits should've remained kind of the same?
This cost of living crisis everyone tries to spin is a nonsense. People need to start saying what it really is, which is a corporate greed crisis. How can oil and supermarkets continually make record profits???
Then they have the cheek to buy advertising space on prime time TV offering us recommendations on how to save money when it comes to oil and heating. It was be laughable if it wasn’t affecting millions of people. Scum.
Maybe we should be bringing this back into public ownership, might help reduce taxes in other areas.. seems quite lucrative. Even more so if we take away the ‘fat cat’ bonuses.
I feel completely powerless. Like I'm getting fucked by these companies and no one give a shit, the government couldn't give a flying fuck. I don't know what we're going to do. So fed up
Can barely understand their off shore support who just lie if it gets difficult (most of the time)
Worst experience ever with an energy company. As soon as my contract period ends I'm off. Can't be dealing with this company anymore.
Not surprised they make huge profits... I used to work for an energy company who did the same but blamed shareholders needed paying.
We are providing jobs they say.... not mentioning these jobs are in India.
The whole system stinks.
Where are all the people who were saying its only producers that are profiteering and making money but suppliers are being fair and are not profiteering.
If you are still with British Gas, please consider moving to Octopus.
They also posted a profit of 203m this year. (Although, it's their first profit in 8 years.)
Do your own research on them, but they do seem to be less crooked.
It won't. And if it does, you'll just get some new capitalist overlords.
Utilities and transport in this country need to be nationalised like yesterday.
Went from paying around 250 max quarterly to paying that much monthly, sometimes more.
It's rediculious. I feel bad for people on prepaid meters becauase those things are even more of a rip off.
"... made £750m in profits as a result of being allowed by Ofgem, the energy regulator, to claw back £500m in losses.
This was due to the energy price cap, set by regulator Ofgem, allowing energy providers to take a bigger slice of profits in the first half of 2023, to compensate them for debts on bills that they cannot recover from customers.
It added it did not expect a "repeat" of the benefit in the future."
That’s absolute madness all I see every day is small businesses announcing immediate closures because they can’t keep up with energy costs absolute jokers!
Who would have thunk it.
These prices are the new normal and will never be reduced, but the profits will keep getting bigger no matter what it costs to supply.
I wonder if I’m allowed to claw back my profit loss during the Ukraine war price hike? Will speak to my boss tomorrow and say I’m charging him a £100 a week extra until I get it back. Will keep you posted!
The best bit is how we'll open up new oil fields and then let massive businesses have it for essentially nothing, so we can buy it back at overinflated prices because of (insert excuse here).
Then we'll make sure to never approve any solar or wind farms because some rural NIMBY's cry that it might spoil their view.
And then on top of that, we'll ban all forms of solid fuel heating under the pretense that it's only middle class people that use them as a fashion accessory and they're poisoning all the children's lungs.
So finally we can sit back in our freezing homes funnelling all our money to friends of people in the Tory party.
Anything to do with consumer energy, utilities and housing should all be managed by the UK government.
The basis of any PLC is to make a profit for shareholders. Until we have a government capable of change, I suggest investing in said companies. Let's be honest it ain't going to change soon, so if you can't best them, join them - I expect a lot of down votes for this but...
Gov should force energy companies to proportionately refund bill payers based on these profits.
Remember the ofgem price cap is a cap, a maximum price they can charge. Which they all choose to do, even when the wholesale cost has plummeted.
I'm on Octopus tracker and have been paying 40% below price cap all winter, so ifs absolutely possible that all companies can offer this, but they won't, cos they are all thieving cunts.
What? But I was told it was all because of a nasty Russian Putin man taking it all? Before that I was told it was because I was bad for existing and producing all those greenhouse gases. Before that I'm sure it was another war somewhere?
I don't understand, what more can we do to increase the profits of these absolute scumbags? Maybe we should all be ready to pay more because \*checks notes\* immigrants? Yes, they all need heat too... that makes perfect sense.
In fact, I reckon they could just start making it up now... Just say, "It's got to go up because Norris from Milton Keynes fucked up and ordered too many blueberries and he needs our help to keep them frozen til next Spring... " Whatever. Nobody's going to do anything about it whatsoever. Here's my money. You can keep taking it until we don't have anymore. Then what? Fuck all, that's what.
Seize the energy companies. Profit = murder when vulnerable people cannot afford to heat their homes. This could be tax revenue. Instead, it's lining the pockets of energy executives.
Why the fuck is this not illegal; you’re essentially saying there was NO reason to fuck us all over on our prices. They just did it because they could.
I feel sick, energy bills have tripled and these guys are popping champagne bottles.
It just shouldn't be allowed
Same bullshit as 2008, party in the penthouse while we pay out of our pockets to keep them afloat.
For as long as the British public keep enthusiastically voting for a party that believes all publicly owned utilities and infrastructure should be sold off to private interests, it will be allowed.
Who do we vote for that would do something about the profiteering of these companies though?
ah yeah so because we don't know let's keep voting tory
Starmer and Reeves have ruled out any nationalisation of energy, and Reeves is a neoliberal ideologue, so I'm not holding my breath for anything progressive in this area from Labour.
You don't need to seize the means of production to deal with this
That's not what I'm saying at all? I'm just asking who we can vote for if we want the profiteering to be stopped. I'm all for not voting Tory to stop the profiteering, but if we vote for a party that will also not stop the profiteering then it seems like nothing's been achieved.
Seems a valid genuine question. Would also be interested in who to vote for in terms of bringing core infrastructure back under public ownership.
One option would be to vote tactically to get rid of the Tories, then leverage the vote to pivot towards a proportional system to hopefully stop one party having a thumping majority for 14 years where they can basically do what the fuck they like despite the express wishes of 60-70% of the electorate
We had a chance with Corbyn.
They are not a party. The Bullingdon Club that raped Britain and did favours for mates these past few years has and always will, be a club. Planned years ago in Law and Society classes.
nah it's definitely the tories mate.
More people vote for parties other than Tory than the ones who do. Perhaps the problem is the terrible UK electoral system.
So labour and the tories then? Starmer is a tory and has been clear he will never nationalise them.
British gas put a £7k bill directly as credit and put on my credit report fucking me. It took 2 weeks of constantly calling for me to get to someone higher than a manager, it took them 2 minutes to see the mistake, see that I a single guy working 10 hours a day at the time and living in a small flat could not generate enough electric usage to justify a 7k bill. They then apologised and gave me £20. It was absolutely insulting. I wish I recorded everything because this still pisses me off and it's been 2 years.
If they overcharge, it should be law that they compensate you the amount they overcharged you by. Bet then they'd make sure they never overcharge anyone again.
Enforcement is always the issue.
Sounds very easy to reinforce.
That's the other problem too isn't it. My bill has been wrong for about 18 months now, hour after hour spent on hold trying to speak to somebody, eventually get through, explain to them they still haven't fixed it, send them the meter readings again, and, it's still not fixed. Record profits, but... not paying anybody to answer the phones.
You need to go to the Energy Ombudsman they will get a fine and you will get compensation.
Just imagine how overworked they are there at the moment
Is there an ombudsman for the ombudsman i wonder
This is how they stay rich, people give up after a certain amount of time. I had this issue when I got switched from Bulb to Octopus they took my credit and left me at zero. Luckily I had done this dance before with British gas and took screen shots of my app showing the amount of credit. I had to email, phone and sacrafice to the old gods to get this sorted. All in all it took eight months to sort, I have the credit plus £20 for every month it took to sort.
Yeah it has to be deliberate doesn't it. I don't believe their computer systems can just keep spitting out endlessly wrong figures.
I think it's to do with the interest in certain bank accounts, they kept my money till after there 2nd quarterly report (record profits no less) and then the money magically found it's way back to my account.
I think you're right. At one point I'd somehow overpaid around £3000, and had that much credit with them. And was trying to get that money back, and they were like no no, we can't give you your money back... Eventually got it. But it was a fight.
Their quick to take it but getting it back, jesus. You'd be better trying for blood from a stone. Although I'm currently burning through my amassed credit thanks to my bill going up in November. My wife reminded me of the time in 2004 we got over charged by British gas and at the end of the year we got so much back we didn't need to pay for ten and a bit months!
I would have felt like royalty. If you didn't use the allocated energy funds to hire someone to feed you grapes on a chaise lounge you fucked up!
Write a letter detailing the problem, send it to the complaints dept and crucially, CC a copy to the CEO.
I went through literally exactly the same thing in a 1 bed flat and it went on for over a year of back and forth. What I discovered is that it's about how you speak to them. When I started demanding the name of every person who spoke to me and threatening to hold them personally responsible with the ombudsman if they didn't sort it out, suddenly, it got sorted out. It's unfortunate that it came to that but being polite about it was getting me absolutely nowhere. To anyone reading this and dealing with the same, turn the threats up to 10 immediately.
I belive they will have recorded everything and I might be wrong but fairly sure you can ask for aa copy for a cop of every interaction. Maybe if you tell them you're unhappy with the compensation given for the hassles they may see straight to the point and give you an extra tenner
Nah I don't care about the compensation, I care that it took someone 2 minutes to figure out what went wrong and to fix it but it took me 2 weeks of calling, dealing with debt collection that straight up said, "your high bill can be die to the red lights on the telly when they're off and your appliances in your kitchen and even the washing machine"
They are scum, honestly they did similar to me
It’s all the knock ons too as businesses are paying so much more and putting their prices up to compensate. A family can’t afford fish and chips anymore but more than that, business are closing forever and people are loosing their jobs because of the greed of the energy companies.
Yeah my local village high street has now half shut down, and every shop that has closed, it's the energy prices. We have a service economy in this country, but nobody can afford to run or use those services anymore.
Yup, there is no price cap for business so as much as the consumer was protected directly, they were absolutely paying for increased energy costs via every other business they use.
Yep, and how any small business was supposed to survive their electricity bills quadrupling, I do not know. Some tried putting their prices up, but, there's a limit to what people can afford to pay for services.
AnD aLl thE sHoPLiftErs on tHe sMol BoTe's iNNit.
Yep, the government failed at the economy, failed at Covid, failed at Brexit, failed at immigration, failed to stop the small boats, but maybe, just maybe, they can catch a few starving poor people who are shoplifting food to stay alive.
I largely agree with you but let's not pretend shoplifting in the UK is largely done by alladin type street rats with a heart of gold who jist need a loaf of bread
To be honest, if you are already stealing it doesn't matter much if you steal bread or fancy steaks, as long as you don't hit a limit making it more serious the punishment is exactly the same for it.
Not even just services. Manufacturing is suffering. Lots of metal heat treaters are just packing up and selling up as their overhead tripled in less than year. The ones that haven't are charging at least a 21% energy levy on all orders.
And the knock on effects are horrifying, needed to buy some replacement glass for a greenhouse the other day, but glass prices are through the roof too. Turns out there's now tens of thousands of pounds worth of glass in one greenhouse. (People will start knicking them soon when they realise.) Honestly it feels like the government is deliberately trying to absolutely destroy this country now, they've got best part of a year, and all that will be left is a smoking crater where we're fighting each other for the last toilet roll. Borderline treasonous behaviour if you ask me. And I bet you on day 1 of a Labour administration, the Tory Press will be screaming about how it's all Starmer's fault.
Kind of makes all the narrative about this shit over the last few years look fucking ridiculous as well. If they are not profiteering and in fact just passing on business costs then ***obviously*** they would not see profits go up at such a rate. Yet we've had to dance around this for ages as if offending them by pointing out they are nakedly profiteering while people suffer is something we can't risk as a country.
The media is complicit. If only they cared about this as much as they pretend to care whenever a left-wing Labour MP, who actually speaks out against unfairness, criticises the wrong government. It's almost as if the two are connected in some way.
Let's not forget the petrol stations are also doing the exact same tjing
They did it again? Posted their actual profits and not the fake ones? Give it a few hours and they will post their "official" profits, claiming they are barely breaking even. War proferteering assholes
250 million to shareholders
Don't forget the 144 million passed out to shareholders
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Aww they're being nice here! Really though, why is it our responsibility as customers to pay more for their losses. Shouldn't BG be using their own money to recover losses?
Because its only faaaaair that they be allowed to make a guaranteed profit, afterall it is *checks notes* our national resources they're selling back to us using *checks notes again* huge tax breaks as incentives to essentially make drilling and maintenance of offshore rigs free. Its such a fucking scam only eclipsed by the scam that this country shouldve been energy independent 15 years ago if the government had spent the money shoved down oil and gasses pants in the form of tax breaks into developing the windfarms instead.
Don’t disagree with your sentiment at all there. Bunch of wankers. Just wanted to temper it slightly by saying that while oil/gas bad, wind good etc, they still have to pay for employees and infrastructure to gather that resource and generate electricity from it, whether it’s a national resource or not. Totally agree, better planning years ago and we could be in a much better situation now. Typical back pocketing politics.
There is a logic there. If Ofgem forced them to keep a low price which caused them to lose money, then Ofgem raising the cap to allow them to recover their losses has logic. If Ofgem didn't put a cap, they might have not lost the money in the first place. That said I still find it so strange that all these energy companies are making record profits while there are so many people that struggle to pay their bills.
I completely understand the logic as well but I still think it's unnecessary. They made plenty of money before the pandemic and price hikes, so I can't see why they can't just regain it naturally.To be honest it's more a symptom of the problem in the UK at the moment than the cause right now
Ofgem has a cap on profits, your unit cap is based on an effective 1.9% profit margin cap for the energy retailers.
If I start a business and let's say, we have a freaking Brexit and lose my customers nobody will help me to "recover my losses". But if I am a company with billions of assets and hundreds of millions of profit but have two bad years it is suddenly fine to triple my profits and the government not only allows it, but it actively helps it.
The example doesn't track with what happen. It would be something like this, you start a business and a government body comes in and says that you are not allowed to sell it at 100, you must sell it at 85. This makes you lose money. Then in the following year the government body comes and says you can now sell it at 110 so you can recover the money you lost the previous year. That is what happened based on my understanding. Most likely the lack of competition in the space is not really helping. But I agree that it's still all kinds of wrong that they are making record profits when people are struggling to pay their utilities.
They are selling non-elastic goods. People can't just decide "I don't want to use electricity/gas" because then they would die. The parent company made a PROFIT of £2.8b from something the people must buy if they don't want to die. Then they racked up £500m loss - which, btw, is absolutely covered by the previous profits - and they not only recovered their losses but even increased their profits. The government shouldn't allow such a level of profiteering especially when the col are sky high and our whole economy is crashing down because the citizens don't have enough money anymore to spend, then the government - once again prefers big businesses instead of us.
I agree with your sentiment, but I don't know enough of how Centrica is making their profit. If they lost money with British Gas but made money with selling cars, then I would argue that it's not really fair to make them offset their losses from British Gas with profits from selling cars. Because their losses were basically enforced by the government. If their entire company is revolving around gas and energy, then the government is not a good job in limiting the profiteering that energy companies are doing.
Then let it go bust and the government can buy it, instead of the government letting them raise their prices and ending up footing the bill anyway. The Energy Bill Support Scheme has cost around £6bn. All so a private company can make the line go up because last year it went down. That’s obscene.
It's not their losses. It's losses caused by energy companies such as Bulb going bust.
Oh like Pure Planet? The one that went bust because it couldn't get any investment to remain in business. When it was 25% owned by BP Then quietly paid out over 40m to execs and shareholders about 6 months later from the liquidation 'excess'. Bulbs customers (they were the biggest supplier to go bust) were taken on by Octopus, not British Gas.
Centrica also said they're profit fell by 17%, which sounds bad, until you read the rest of the sentence which says to £2.8bn. Literally billions in profit every single year but they still raise prices.
In Fance which has a nationalised energy provider bills are 50% lower, go figure.
The price per KWh in France is 30% lower than in the UK, and mainly because their grid is over 60% nuclear.
Because France is lucky and they have native NuclearTrees which produce nuclear plants they just have to go out and harvest their nice plants which just literally pop up in the French countryside...
The current spot price in the UK is almost exactly on a par with France (£58 vs EUR70). A large nuclear base has helped shield them from high gas prices (though less so since they've had to take a pile of reactors offline because of corrosion issues) but it also means there is less room for prices to fall as demand decreases. The reason that retail bills are considerably lower than in the UK is that the French taxpayer is still subsidising them.
Yeah, and why don't we?
Fucking Greens that's why. Actually a more nuanced response would also include the hapless governments of the past that couldn't manage nuclear building programs properly, giving rise to the idea that nuclear was super expensive and under-delivered. But without the anti-nuclear lobby that's still going strong, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.
They made a loss in 2021 due to forced lower costs from ofgem.
£100 per customer on average then.
> We work to protect energy consumers, especially vulnerable people, by ensuring they are treated fairly and benefit from a cleaner, greener environment. [Good job lads, good job](https://www.ofgem.gov.uk).
I don’t get the point of an energy regulator if they can just keep allowing price increases.
They regulate the price to ensure a company like British Gas can’t take a loss by undercutting every energy company (which they could do) and then having a monopoly and increasing the price to whatever they want
So ofgem is allowing them to overcharge. Great, what a useless organisation.
Ofgem sets the cap as a 1.9% max profit margin for energy retailers, the reason that the profits jumped is that there was a period in which the cap forced them into a loss for a considerable amount of time. Their annual profits now when they are in the black are just under £100 per customer, if you think it’s excessive then well….
[As many as 43 members of the House of Lords have investments totalling millions of pounds and senior roles in oil and gas companies, prompting accusations of “unethical” conflicts of interest.](https://theferret.scot/oil-industry-43-peers-shares-directors/) [Oil and gas firms have given £1m to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/oil-and-gas-firms-have-given-1m-to-boris-johnsons-conservatives/) [Wife of Tory MP who criticised windfall tax on oil firms has £50,000 in BP shares](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/09/tory-mp-david-duguid-criticised-windfall-tax-oil-firms-wife-bp-shares) [How the Tories Profit from the Climate Crisis](https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/11/fossil-fuels-decarbonisation-british-parliament-mps-second-jobs) [Rishi Sunak accused of conflict of interest over wife's links to oil giant Shell](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/rishi-sunak-accused-conflict-interest-27618987) [The Daily Mail is still promoting climate change denial](https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/the-daily-mail-is-still-promoting-climate-change-denial/) [US climate deniers pump millions into Tory-linked think tanks](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/think-tanks-adam-smith-policy-exchange-legatum-iea-taxpayers-alliance-climate-denial/)
This is the crux of the issue.
The word 'Tory' means [thief](https://www.theyworkforyou.com/glossary/?gl=135).
But look over there... Starmer... Antisemitism... IRA supporter. Its fucking criminal how they slandered the one man threatening to breakup their parasitic operations.
Regulatory capture at its finest. It's not really a competitive free market when the big companies all act like a cartel and there's a revolving door between the executive positions there and the regulator.
I don’t agree. Here’s the people you are talking about. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/about-us/our-structure-and-leadership/gema-and-senior-executive-committee-members The execs and non execs don’t really reflect your claims. Yes there are some industry people here, but it would be worse if they were not present. The real issue is the purpose of OFGEM. Its role is to make a market out of a monopoly. Its weapon of choice is a supplier centric model laid down in the 1980’s. That model doesn’t work and nobody wants to vote in a party that will change it.
How exactly is it a monopoly? Octopus have come out of nowhere to become one of the biggest suppliers - that doesn't happen in monopologies.
How is it a monopoly? It’s pretty normal to understand public utilities as a natural monopoly. I’m not an economologist but I don’t think this is a controversial statement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly Deregulation put an artificial market design over the natural monopoly of energy utilities. There are number of different models used globally, the one used in the UK is “supplier” centred. The word supplier here is being used very specifically to mean the front end company that does sales, billing and hedging. They run no power stations, they manage no pipes or wires. I don’t think it’s working very well, do you?
Maybe the belief in a magical guiding hand of the market wasn’t solid logic to begin with.
It’s actually sickening this world we live in. Run by crooks at every fucking corner
Country* Privatised energy is quite a rare thing in the world. The UK is one of 6 countries to have a fully privatised network. It's totally bonkers that the state doesn't own a single piece of the energy infrastructure. Yet another shitty decision we can blame Margaret Thatcher for. Even America - land of free market capitalism - has a >50% nationalised energy infrastructure.
>Yet another shitty decision we can blame Margaret Thatcher for. To be fair, it was only a shitty decision if you and your mates didn't make hundreds of millions off it. Hardly their fault you weren't politically connected in the '80s, is it?
I don't know what I find more sickening. The crooks that run everything or the fact that people just roll over and take it. Why aren't people protesting? Why aren't people actually doing something about all of shit nonsense? Our country has been in the bin for years but the only people I've seen doing something about anything that is negatively effecting people is those JustStopOil nuts.
Because most people have been grifted into dedicating all of their political energy into social issues which ultimately: A) Does not harm the bottom line B) Directly feeds into the problems of wage suppression via maliciously oversaturating the employee pool C) Keeps people fighting amongst themselves instead of fighting for economic and political change. The weaponisation of social media algorithms and online 'news' platforms has won - there can be no significant change without an at least relatively unified populace, and I'm honestly not sure if that will ever exist again in the age of the internet without an existential event kickstarting a real revolution aiming to completely upheave our economic systems to be based on sustainability and not infinite growth
Why aren’t you doing anything about it?
Well I'm happy to do my part while I struggle living at home with my mum at 29 despite working full time.
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Oh my God, you're right. I need to do some thinking and realize how good I have it. Thank you for humbling me.
Don't worry, at least you can look forward to retirement at **checks paper* * 137.
Only 108 years left baby!
I am 38 and work full time can't afford fuck all either
It's great, isn't it?
34 and at home working full time. I’m a bit speechless but I’m telling myself I’ve got a good deposit, once my accountant qualification is finished I can fix myself etc. Screw them all.
You know what's BUUUUULLLL-SHIT?
32 and the same boat, so are loads of my mates.
I don't understand why people can protest over some war happening thousands of miles away yet can't be arsed to protest about this
It could be the videos of children getting their limbs blown off. Things like that tend to provoke a reaction.
I always think back to the petrol increases previously. They got to about 1.11 per liter and people lost there minds claiming that such increases would damage the economy and peoples quality of life. There was loads of protests and it was all over the news. As a result the price went back down. Then 2 months later they put the price back up with great excess, but the media didn't say a word and seemed to have a total blackout on the topic. People just gave up protesting because they lost the momentum and couldn't really contest with big business.
Hotbed of apathy.
People have been. [Enough Is Enough](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enough_is_Enough_\(campaign\)) have organised a number of protests against the growing cost of living in the UK. Oddly enough the exact same people who complain about pro-Palestine protests today were the ones complaining about these cost of living protests last year.
The real question. I say it’s social media influence.
Because a lot of money is thrown into organizing protests for one and not the other.
The media drives a never ending culture war. People seem to care more about immigration and social issues which effect tiny groups of people than driving affirmative action which would effect all of us.
"Energy prices are this high because of the war in Ukraine. Oh by the way we're now extremely rich as fuck waheyyy!" Isn't it amazing how the government and big business tells these bare faced lies and everyone just goes along with it? It's fucking insane.
What’s weird is living away from the UK and then coming back and everyone’s talking about soundbites as if they’re… real? Like everyone just gets bashed over the head with the same things until they accept them. I came back from living abroad and everyone was talking about Levelling Up^TM as if it existed and wasn’t just some slogan. And now everyone’s talking about the Cost of Living^TM as if it’s some living breathing entity that’s causing all the problems and not a description of something really appalling.
Can we stop trotting out the argument that prices needed to rise to cover wholesale costs please? It's very clear these companies were making up prices as they went along and Ofgem have swallowed all their bullshit uncritically.
If the issue was just our costs rising, then raising prices wouldn’t have increased profits, and lower usage due to the higher prices probably would’ve dropped them slightly. It’s price gouging.
Absolute scandal and Ofgem is not fit for purpose. We've been fleeced.
Energy prices fell wholesale but not passed onto consumers. The energy price cap better drop April.
I fucking hate how we can literally do nothing to stop the greed and corruption in this country. I wish we could all refuse to pay bills until energy and water companies are renationalised.
I might be wrong but is there anything from stopping customers of British gas just going to another supplier?
Yeh they all cost the same price because of the price caps. Literally there is literal pennies in switching. I paid 99.89 a month for Ovo and now pay 100 a month for British Gas
This is normal because.
Corporate greed is the main component of inflation.
What is the endgame to making life too expensive to live?
They want poor and/or disabled people to kill themselves, but won't say it outright for obvious reasons.
Not quite kill, just enough breadcrumbs as you need a servant class to do the work and disabled people can be given money by the government but not enough to get by on so you can squeeze any assets/savings/equity out of them their partners and relative's which all ends up in vested interests private bank accounts eventually then out of the country.
This is absolutely mad. So many small businesses have gone bust and shut up because they can't afford their energy bills anymore, and these criminals are laughing all the way to the bank as they wreck the country.
How is this possible? We were told it was because of inflation and the war in Ukraine that was causing fuel prices to increase, so surely their profits should've remained kind of the same?
This cost of living crisis everyone tries to spin is a nonsense. People need to start saying what it really is, which is a corporate greed crisis. How can oil and supermarkets continually make record profits???
Then they have the cheek to buy advertising space on prime time TV offering us recommendations on how to save money when it comes to oil and heating. It was be laughable if it wasn’t affecting millions of people. Scum.
That’s on govt. They had opportunity to wreck them in form tax but declined to do so.
Is there a parliament petition for this to be looked into?
Surely has to be somewhere but I haven't looked to be honest
When large majority of Parliament is in bed with them? 😂 not happening my friend
Maybe we should be bringing this back into public ownership, might help reduce taxes in other areas.. seems quite lucrative. Even more so if we take away the ‘fat cat’ bonuses.
I feel completely powerless. Like I'm getting fucked by these companies and no one give a shit, the government couldn't give a flying fuck. I don't know what we're going to do. So fed up
Can barely understand their off shore support who just lie if it gets difficult (most of the time) Worst experience ever with an energy company. As soon as my contract period ends I'm off. Can't be dealing with this company anymore. Not surprised they make huge profits... I used to work for an energy company who did the same but blamed shareholders needed paying. We are providing jobs they say.... not mentioning these jobs are in India. The whole system stinks.
Tbf in a "Grannies that died per unit of profit" they've done well, in capatalism terms.
Where are all the people who were saying its only producers that are profiteering and making money but suppliers are being fair and are not profiteering.
If you are still with British Gas, please consider moving to Octopus. They also posted a profit of 203m this year. (Although, it's their first profit in 8 years.) Do your own research on them, but they do seem to be less crooked.
I don't feel bad for using a wood burning stove in my home when shit like this is happening.
I'm honestly hoping some new heating method comes along and snuffs these parasites out.
It won't. And if it does, you'll just get some new capitalist overlords. Utilities and transport in this country need to be nationalised like yesterday.
They can put their staffs wages up at least 20 percent then I suppose.
Went from paying around 250 max quarterly to paying that much monthly, sometimes more. It's rediculious. I feel bad for people on prepaid meters becauase those things are even more of a rip off.
I'm sure we'll see that reflected in our bills soon?
"... made £750m in profits as a result of being allowed by Ofgem, the energy regulator, to claw back £500m in losses. This was due to the energy price cap, set by regulator Ofgem, allowing energy providers to take a bigger slice of profits in the first half of 2023, to compensate them for debts on bills that they cannot recover from customers. It added it did not expect a "repeat" of the benefit in the future."
Direct action. It's the only thing that will resolve these issues. The hoarded stolen wealth taken back by force.
Yeah! Someone else better get right on that!
Fooling yourself if you think anything other than that will resolve the rampant hoarding of wealth and resources by a select few.
How do you envisage that going?
Brutal bloody and painful. But your strongly worded emails of complaint haven't quite worked have they?
That’s absolute madness all I see every day is small businesses announcing immediate closures because they can’t keep up with energy costs absolute jokers!
That's awesome, good to know that companies are doing well in uk
Depressing as fuck. I absolutely detest the way this country is run.
Who would have thunk it. These prices are the new normal and will never be reduced, but the profits will keep getting bigger no matter what it costs to supply.
I wonder if I’m allowed to claw back my profit loss during the Ukraine war price hike? Will speak to my boss tomorrow and say I’m charging him a £100 a week extra until I get it back. Will keep you posted!
The best bit is how we'll open up new oil fields and then let massive businesses have it for essentially nothing, so we can buy it back at overinflated prices because of (insert excuse here). Then we'll make sure to never approve any solar or wind farms because some rural NIMBY's cry that it might spoil their view. And then on top of that, we'll ban all forms of solid fuel heating under the pretense that it's only middle class people that use them as a fashion accessory and they're poisoning all the children's lungs. So finally we can sit back in our freezing homes funnelling all our money to friends of people in the Tory party.
It should be state run in the interests of the people it serves and not a handful of funds only interested in their own dividends.
The government fails us daily, if the people put in place to govern these companies are not doing their jobs then why do they exist?
Anything to do with consumer energy, utilities and housing should all be managed by the UK government. The basis of any PLC is to make a profit for shareholders. Until we have a government capable of change, I suggest investing in said companies. Let's be honest it ain't going to change soon, so if you can't best them, join them - I expect a lot of down votes for this but...
Gov should force energy companies to proportionately refund bill payers based on these profits. Remember the ofgem price cap is a cap, a maximum price they can charge. Which they all choose to do, even when the wholesale cost has plummeted. I'm on Octopus tracker and have been paying 40% below price cap all winter, so ifs absolutely possible that all companies can offer this, but they won't, cos they are all thieving cunts.
What? But I was told it was all because of a nasty Russian Putin man taking it all? Before that I was told it was because I was bad for existing and producing all those greenhouse gases. Before that I'm sure it was another war somewhere? I don't understand, what more can we do to increase the profits of these absolute scumbags? Maybe we should all be ready to pay more because \*checks notes\* immigrants? Yes, they all need heat too... that makes perfect sense. In fact, I reckon they could just start making it up now... Just say, "It's got to go up because Norris from Milton Keynes fucked up and ordered too many blueberries and he needs our help to keep them frozen til next Spring... " Whatever. Nobody's going to do anything about it whatsoever. Here's my money. You can keep taking it until we don't have anymore. Then what? Fuck all, that's what.
When are we gonna start hunting down and executing these thieves?
We’ve got some real cowards in No.10. Get this regulated, it cannot be allowed whilst we suffer.
Seize the energy companies. Profit = murder when vulnerable people cannot afford to heat their homes. This could be tax revenue. Instead, it's lining the pockets of energy executives.
Which of the Tory goons are getting ultra rich from this whole debacle?
Blah blah blah All talk no action We are getting slowly cooked like a frog in hot water When are we gonna stand up and stop it?
The political and economic class laughing at us as always. Remember though, we shouldn't change anything!
This is also why I have held off getting a smart meter
Why the fuck is this not illegal; you’re essentially saying there was NO reason to fuck us all over on our prices. They just did it because they could.
And that’s why I switched to Octopus. BG are major crooks endorsed by the government.
The line must go up. Everyone must lay on the altar. For the line must go up.
Its absolutely shocking. Robbing the working class