Energy: prepayment dynamite

By Richard North - January 13, 2023

The subject of pre-payment meters popped up on Wednesday, making an appearance in the Guardian, in The Times and the BBC.

Last time we dealt with this issue on the blog, Magistrates were milking the system by taking fees for issuing bulk warrants, without doing even basic checks to ensure that the statutory conditions for their issue were satisfied.

The iNews paper followed this up just before Christmas, reporting that magistrates had insisted they had “no choice” but to grant the warrants, with the Magistrates’ Association claiming that there was “no judicial discretion”.

This, to say the very least, is a specious claim as the magistrates still have the duty to test evidence given on oath by the utilities’ representatives, especially where there may be no defence submissions. It is no part of the magistrates’ duties to act as rubber stamps for commercial interests, otherwise they might just as well hire themselves out as “speak your weight” machines.

That much was agreed by Alan Murdie, a barrister and chairman of Nucleus Legal Advice in London, which provides access to justice to disadvantaged people. His view was that the Magistrates’ Association was in error claiming they had no discretion.

“It is like any other judicial warrant in that regard”, he said. “The court must be satisfied on reasonable grounds it is proper to grant it”, adding that Magistrates can be subject to judicial review in the High Court.

“At the very least a court can adjourn an application”, Murdie observed. “The power of adjournment is a fundamental one available to every court. There is really no excuse for this kind of limited understanding of the legality of granting a warrant”.

In a further development, iNnews reported on Tuesday that two Government ministers have told MPs they will raise the issue of prepayment energy meters with the judiciary.

One was Justice minister, Mike Freer, who told the Commons after he had been asked by MP Rachael Maskell what steps he was taking to ensure courts scrutinise each warrant application.

The minister responded: “I appreciate this is clearly a very sensitive issue with families and people who are very vulnerable”. He then said: “I will raise those concerns with the judiciary and see if I can find out the details – and stress the importance of getting it right and not rushing justice”.

The following day, energy minister, Graham Stuart, in a Westminster Hall debate took on board the same issue and promised he would “raise the matter with colleagues at the Ministry of Justice, ask them to look at it and go from there”.

Thus, there is some faint hope that the glaring and quite unacceptable failure of the judicial establishment might at last be addressed by government. And now the general issue of prepayment meters has re-emerged because of a call by Clare Moriarty, chief executive of Citizens Advice, for the forced installation of prepayment meters to be stopped.

Moriarty bases her call on the estimate that 600,000 people have been forced to make the switch away from credit meters after racking up debt with their energy supplier in 2022, compared with 380,000 in 2021.

Citizens Advice now fears a further 160,000 people could be switched by the end of winter if no further action is taken, which has Moriarty saying that, “If the energy regulator doesn’t act, the government must intervene”.

Crucially, though, the concern was that pre-payment meters were being used as back-door disconnection. For many, Citizens Advice said, running out of credit is not a one-off event. More than 2 million people were being disconnected at least once a month, according to the report. A fifth of those on “prepay” reported going without heat or light for at least 24 hours, unable to cook or wash.

More people sought the help of Citizens Advice because they couldn’t top up in 2022 than in the previous 10 years combined.

Moriarty was joined by Rachael Maskell, Labour MP for York Central, who told the Guardian that: “It is evident there is an escalation of people being forced on to prepayment meters where they’re paying more for their energy. If they’re unable to pay, they’re simply self-rationing”.

Thus she says, “I’m calling on government to get a grip on the situation to enable people to remain on energy contracts with support, and prepay meters need serious redress, if not being ruled out completely, as an option for people in fuel poverty”.

There it stood until Thursday, when the subject was raised once again in the House of Commons, this time in Business of the House, addressed to the leader of the House, Penny Mordaunt.

Reported by the Guardian – and only that paper, it seems – under the heading: “MPs warn over forced prepayment meters as cold weather returns”, it had Hilary Benn, Labour MP for Leeds Central calling for a statement from the government about its intention to ban enforced prepayment meters, “so that our constituents do not lose their right to light and to warmth?”

Labour MP Clive Efford told Mordaunt that, since November 2021, the courts had allowed 370,000 forced entry warrants – 30,000 a month. The applicant companies, he said, cannot possibly be doing the right checks on people before the warrants are being sought, and the courts certainly are not questioning them when issuing them—they are issued literally in seconds flat.

Thus, he too asked for a statement from government. “Next week”, he said, “the weather will turn freezing again, so this is very urgent indeed, because it is happening now”. He added: “Some smart meters are switched off without people’s knowledge, and they only find out when their electricity goes off. We cannot allow this to happen”.

Rachael Maskell also joined in, asking the government to set out its position on prepayment meters “urgently” because ministers needed to “scrutinise exactly what governments are doing to protect the most vulnerable people from fuel poverty”.

Responding for the government, Mordaunt acknowledged that there was a “huge disparity across the country” in the number of warrants being issued. She noted that the magistrates court within her constituency in Portsmouth – one of the worst “rubber stamp” offenders – had signed off thousands of warrants. On the behaviour of the courts, she said she would raise the issue within government.

On yet another occasion, therefore, MPs have formally brought this issue to the notice of the government, and brought to their attention the behaviour of the courts. They cannot pretend they don’t know the score.

And yet, there is no good cause to believe that we will see any action soon, despite, according to iNews, the government having admitted in response to a written question from Dan Carden MP that “no specific assessment” has been made of the potential health impact of people being forced to self-disconnect their prepayment meters this winter.

But, while the plebs are so easily subject to sanctions when they don’t conform with the system, the government needs to be aware of the dynamite potential of this issue, where courts are conspiring with the utilities to break the rules, while the regulator, Ofgem, seems to have nothing to say.

Revolutions have been caused by less.