Politics: civil disobedience

By Richard North - April 24, 2023

I was sorry to see the article in the Sunday Times yesterday, headed: “The shock of being hit with a £7,500 energy bill”, concerning customers who had been sent inflated bills by their energy suppliers on the basis of estimated or incorrect meter readings.

It’s not so much the piece itself which causes so much sorrow, though, as the sentiment expressed in the sub-heading to the piece. It starts off well enough, telling us: “Suppliers have made record profits lately, but they are still sending out terrifying bills”, but it’s that last bit that does the damage where it cautions: “Don’t let them get away with it”.

The piece starts with an account of the experience of Roz Colthart who moved her studio rental business seven doors down the road last June. She was then sent two extortionate energy bills. One, from Opus, was £6,290 for five months. The other, from SSE, was for £1,230 for ten days.

From the context, it appears that Colthart did not pay these bills, but called to check the prices. When she did, Opus revised its bill down to £233 and SSE’s was cut to £23.

And that’s the issue. If one is presented with an inflated bill from an energy supplier – or any supplier for that matter – the automatic response should be to withhold payment until the matter is settled. No one should need telling that they should not let the supplier “get away with it”.

This is especially the case as these inflated bills don’t seem to be entirely accidental. According to the article, thousands of customers say that they have been overcharged for gas and electricity because their bills were based on estimated usage.

Last year 2,848 people complained about incorrect estimates to the Energy Ombudsman, which has had more than 630 complaints so far this year. There were 2,066 in 2021. Bearing in mind that only a very small proportion of complaints get as far as the Ombudsman, that is a significant number.

Perhaps a better indication of the scale of what appears to be deliberate price gouging occurred in July last year, when Ofgem ordered suppliers to review the bills of 500,000 customers whose direct debit payments had been increased by more than 100 percent between February and April.

At the time, the energy cap set by Ofgem has permitted increases in domestic gas and electricity of 54 percent, suggesting a certain eagerness of the suppliers to pad their balance sheets at the expense of their customers.

On top of that, there are multiple examples of instances similar to this where, despite holding a substantial credit surplus – in this case £800 – the supplier sought to double its customer’s monthly direct debit charge.

Having dumped my own direct debit arrangement when EDF sought almost to double it, I found the first set of estimated bills were remarkably accurate. Then, after a delay in billing over the winter, the supplier decided that – contrary to the experience of virtually every consumer in the country – I had actually increased my energy consumption, year-on-year.

According to the ST article, what I should have been doing to taking regular meter readings and conveying them to the supplier, as “the best way to ensure that your bill is accurate”.

But then we get the likes of Ofgem stating that if a customer provides a meter reading to a supplier that is reasonably accurate, the supplier must take all reasonable steps to ensure this reading is applied to their next bill.

If, for any reason, the supplier believes the meter reading is not accurate, then it must take all reasonable steps to obtain a new reading as soon as possible, the regulator says. And, if you get an energy bill that you think is wrong, you are advised to complain to your supplier immediately.

But it is here that the “Uncle Tom” counsel of the regulator seemingly dumps the responsibility on customers to ensure the bills are accurate. One wonders how long a supermarket chain would last if its prices were set at random and erratically high, leaving customers to haggle over their bills at the checkout, when prices deviated from those advertised.

To my mind, it is the responsibility of suppliers to prepare accurate bills, and no part of the customer’s duty to provide them with meter readings. And, if suppliers cannot perform that task – which is, after all, their main function – then the obvious and only response is to withhold payment until a correct bill is supplied.

For some though, taking this robust line goes beyond straightforward supplier/ customer relations and enters the territory of civil disobedience. And there may be an element of truth in this. One of the aims of dealing with suppliers in this way is to “punish” the suppliers for malpractice and to send them a message that they cannot take their customers for granted.

If one felt, on the other hand, that complaints were quickly and effectively resolved, it would not be necessary to take such action. But the experience of many suggests that suppliers deliberately complicate their contact procedures, making it difficult and time-consuming to get a resolution.

Here, there is some parallel with a piece by Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer stating that “the public have lost faith in all politicians”. Actually, he goes further citing a survey by the Policy Institute at King’s College London.

This tells us that the rot has spread well beyond the political institutions, spreading to the police, where confidence is down to 67 percent in 2022, down from 87 percent in 1981 (still surprisingly high), to the press.

There, in what was an international survey, we are told that of the 24 countries surveyed, only people in Egypt (at 8 percent) had less confidence in the press than the UK, which delivered a depressing 13 percent.

In the nature of the survey, trust in energy suppliers was not tested but it would not be difficult to believe that confidence levels were similar to or less than that “enjoyed” by the fourth estate. And I doubt whether Ofgem would score higher.

Where, under such circumstance, trust has evaporated, civil disobedience is indeed the only sane response. And if that is the stance taken by Extinction Rebellion and their fellow travellers – whose views are explored in the Sunday Times this week – then one has to observe that, what is good for the goose should also be good for the gander.

The Extinction Rebellion group is claiming that it is about to unleash “the greatest acts of civil disobedience” in British history later this year if prime minister Sunak does not meet its demands. But if a vocal minority can capture the headlines, the persistence of the “silent majority” can have a much greater effect if applied in the right way.

Here, I cannot help but feel that there is a growing rebellion taking place on our street, in response to the frenetic and increasingly irrational demands for recycling. Despite continued propaganda, in area after area, the amount of recycled waste which is wrongly deposited in recycling bins seems to be on the increase.

Even the fabled Green council of Brighton and Hove is having trouble and while the phenomenon of “wishcycling” may be partly to blame, others are undoubtedly taking the list of “don’ts” so helpfully provided as a vade mecum, in response to the continued hectoring.

When it comes to energy, though, the need for spirited disobedience seems all the more necessary when one sees that the suppliers’ friend, Ofgem, is set to allow bills to increase to cover the bad debts arising from their predatory price increases.

The logic of this is that, as more people don’t pay because prices have increased, Ofgem will allow greater increases which will mean that even more people don’t pay, until we get to the situation where the fabulously wealthy KCIII ends up as the only man in the country paying the bill for all the rest of us. This seems a reasonable objective to make happen.