Domestic Gas and Electricity (Tariff Cap) Bill (Third sitting)

Caroline Flint Excerpts

Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 15th March 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Minister for Energy and Clean Growth (Claire Perry)]

Good morning, Sir Edward. It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your august chairmanship, and I am impressed with your X-ray eyes seeing the coffee cup. It is, once again, a pleasure to welcome fellow travellers on our Committee.

I was of course interested in what the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun said—in essence getting back to that long-term question that we have all been discussing as to what “good” looks like. In 2023 how will we know whether the cap can be removed? Interestingly, the hon. Gentleman is in a way seeking to bind the hands of a future Government with his amendment, by putting in place, when the cap is finally removed—I think we all agree with the sunset clause—the need to opine as to whether further legislation should be introduced.

My hope is to persuade the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the amendment, so I shall set out a couple of reasons why he should, although I think we all agree that we support the cap. We want the cap to be in place for the period it takes to restore effective competition in the market. We also agree that we do not want permanent caps to run in the market, because we want it to move towards a more competitive position. The Bill is an intelligent intervention to speed up that journey.

Frankly, the Government have no wish for a price cap to be a permanent feature of our energy market. We debated that point briefly last week. I think there is strong consensus in the Committee—if I have not misjudged it—that the cap should have a sunset clause. In order for a sunset clause to be effective, there should be an end date to the legislation. Of course, as we discussed last week, that does not simply mean we will pass the Bill quickly through both Houses—as I hope we will—and have the cap in place by the end of the year, as Ofgem has assured us is possible; we will also all be working alongside Ofgem to ensure that the conditions for effective competition are in place by the 2023 deadline. I think we would all want to see those conditions in place well before that date.

Ultimately, we want a fully working and competitive market that is transparent, innovative and adaptive, that promotes competition as the best driver of value and service to customers, and that has a regulator with the powers and appetite to regulate actively should a situation arise, as it has done, where we do not believe some groups of customers get that value and service.

We discussed last week the roll-out of smart meters—where we have seen good progress but we need to go further and faster—and moving to faster and more reliable switching. I am very interested in Ofgem’s midata proposals, which will make switching an almost seamless process. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose), who was so instrumental in creating the Bill, told me about his latest app, Flipper, which enables someone’s supplies of various services to be transferred almost seamlessly, with their consent, to the best value tariff, based on what tariff they are looking for.

There are plenty of opportunities for consumers to benefit from that improved competition, but we have discussed the fact that, although some of us are active switchers and are aware of those opportunities, some of us are too time-poor to do that. Worryingly, there is a large group of customers who are on bad-value tariffs and either do not know it or are sufficiently disengaged from the market not to do anything about it. That is why we brought forward the Bill and why it is extremely important to test the initiatives that the Competition and Markets Authority proposed to improve engagement with so-called disengaged customers.

We have discussed incredibly exciting technological changes, such as the move to distributed energy, the increase in renewable energy and people’s ability almost to create their own energy network, which includes them, local businesses and other local energy consumers. New business models will also come into the sector. I was interested to hear the evidence of some of the more innovative new entrants about where they want to go with the market. They mentioned half-hourly settlement and payments to people who do not consume energy at certain times. There is an enormous range of adaptations, and of course smart metering will unlock even more.

We are all determined to have a fully competitive and fair energy market, but I think we are all of a mind that the cap should be a temporary measure. I pay tribute once again to my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling, who serves with great effect on the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, to which we all owe a great debt of gratitude. The Committee said that there is a risk that if the price cap became a longer- term fixture it

“would put the Government unduly in charge of setting energy prices for the foreseeable future.”

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

rose—

[Claire Perry]

It is always a pleasure to give way to the right hon. Lady.

[Caroline Flint]

I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way and congratulate her on receiving Privy Counsellor status—she joins a merry band of us. I accept the argument for a temporary price cap, but does she accept that we should look closely during this period at whether any other structural reform of the energy market is needed to ensure that there is even wider competition and hunger for customers, rather than complacency?

[Claire Perry]

I could not agree more. I thank the right hon. Lady for her kind congratulations. I feel it is an undeserved honour, but it is amazing. She is absolutely right. One of the reasons we were minded to bring forward the Bill was that we have a competitive energy market, with more than 60 companies that would like to sell us energy—either combined heat and power or, in some cases, just power—but we gifted incumbency to a large number of companies when we took what I thought were sensible steps to privatise the energy system. That brought in more than £60 billion of new capital and caused prices to fall and power cuts to halve, but the companies that were gifted incumbency have not had to work for customers. It was interesting to hear from new entrants about how they are determined to shake up that complacency.

I think the right hon. Lady also alluded to practices further up the energy system—or further down; I am not sure whether it starts at the top or the bottom—and particularly profits in the distribution sector and overall network costs, which have come down but arguably could come down further. Work has been done in that area, but I am determined that the whole sector, from generation right to the customer’s meter, should be highly efficient, that efficiency and customer service should be rewarded, and that we ensure we have not created a shield of incumbency that allows companies to persist with bad customer practices. This is the start. We may not need legislation to get there, so we may not have the pleasure of—

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The advantage of such a system is that trading is completely transparent at all times. At that point, depending on how far down the curve the pool goes, there are no bilateral deals, which hon. Members may well know have been quite a subject for investigation in previous years. It is not always obvious with bilateral deals in which companies are effectively trading with themselves—when one company has both generation and retail capacities—that they affect what is happening with the real price of energy at the point at which the trade is made. Nor is it particularly obvious, because it is not transparent, whether those deals are in the public interest in keeping the prices as low as possible. Suggestions have been made that on occasions where companies are effectively dealing with themselves, there can be price transfer. That is, a company is actually trading up in its bilateral deals, so that a price is taken out of the retail and transferred to the wholesale operation and an additional profit could be made.

[Caroline Flint]

My hon. Friend is making an important point. To sum it up, the big six are both generators and retailers. The case is that they generate energy, sell it to themselves and then sell it on to us, without us really being clear about what the true price is. But does he agree that the advantage of a more transparent pool is for those independent generators to have a marketplace in which they can sell their energy, as well as those smaller retailers that would like to operate in a much more open and transparent way? I am glad to say that that was the policy when I was shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. If, like other policy areas, it seems to be more popular these days, more strength to his elbow.

[Dr Whitehead]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that encapsulation of how the pool works and for her important point that a pool system would allow independent generators to trade on exactly the same basis as those vertically integrated generators, and, equally importantly, independent retailers bidding into the market would be able to bid in transparently, on the basis that they would know what the price was at that particular point. There would be hands on the table and the price would be clear for everybody. The whole trading process would be thoroughly transparent, to the particular advantage of how the market works in its new incarnation as a large number of independent retailers and generators operating alongside the more integrated generators and those large inheritors of customers from, essentially, the days of the Central Electricity Generating Board.

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However, what the proposal of a relative cap does really well is draw attention to a serious, big problem in the energy market today. If energy companies have a very substantial range between tariffs, that affects their ability to switch their customers, and particularly their sticky customers. Let us not forget the range of sticky customers—people on variable tariffs—that a number of companies have. I think SSE, for example, has 89% of its customers on standard variable tariffs and other similar tariffs. Most of the big six have well over 50%. Even some of the newer energy companies are accreting a number of customers who are in that position. Those customers, who have been the focus of the Bill, are the most prone to particular energy companies effectively trading on their loyalty to change the terms of the tariffs over a period of time, so that they migrate towards the top end of the tariff range, rather than the bottom end, which they may have entered into an agreement on in the first place. Even if someone is on a fixed-term tariff offered at a particular point by an electricity company with a substantial tariff range, thinks they got a particularly good deal from that company and is a loyal customer, they may well find themselves placed on a new tariff towards the top end of that company’s tariff range when that mode of deal comes to an end. In many instances, people do not know that has happened: they thought they were getting a good deal but find that they are paying through the nose for their electricity.

[Caroline Flint]

It is worth exploring what might happen down the road when the temporary price cap ends. I am in favour of an absolute price cap rather than a relative price cap. I am listening very carefully to what my hon. Friend is saying and I have read the new clause, but may I say this to him in a friendly way? My concern is that there is a danger that what he is putting forward may inadvertently create a relative price cap and I am against that because a company could set its highest tariff very high so that, even if there were a 6% differential, it would be a differential between a high tariff and a really high tariff. I am totally at one with him on ensuring that another set of bad practices does not come in when the temporary price cap ends, but is there not a danger that that might be the unintended consequence of his new clause?

[Dr Whitehead]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that important point about trying to look at the consequences of what may happen when the price cap ends. Indeed, the new clause considers precisely what circumstances will be in place at that point. In essence, its purpose is to require the Secretary of State to produce a report on what might happen to relative tariff differentials in the period after the price cap ends. I suggest that that may be one of the pillars of a return to reasonable market conditions when the cap ends. If that pillar and other matters relating to the market working well were in place, and had been franked by Ofgem as being in place, the relative tariff range limitation device might come into place at that point.

In those circumstances, it would make no sense for an energy company to start with a very high tariff, because it would simply lose a whole pile of customers. Indeed, in circumstances where companies have done that, for various reasons, they have bled a very large number of customers. We can see that in some of Centrica’s activities, for example. It seems to me that in circumstances where the market was otherwise working reasonably well, the market itself would determine whether companies could hoick their original offer tariff really high to take advantage of a restricted tariff level. That may simply not be a viable strategy for them to adopt under those circumstances. At the same time, however, companies that had offered a competitive tariff would not have the option of transferring customers to a non-competitive tariff if they did not switch.

That is particularly important given that all the evidence we have so far shows that, whatever we do and whatever remedies or new instruments are put in place, it is unlikely that we will ever have a market in which everyone actively switches. It is extremely likely that the system will continue to operate on the basis of a majority of people one way or another not switching and a minority of people switching, sometimes very actively. Yes, perhaps that switching would keep the market in order, but the market nevertheless would still carry a large number of people who did not switch.

In the past, people not switching has led to the maintenance of SVTs and default tariffs. Even when measures are applied, such as Ofgem’s experiments with getting people to switch on the terms of the CMA’s recommendations—a number of pilots have been carried out, including letters from energy companies or from Ofgem informing people about how they might switch —a good number of people do not switch. We have a reasonable responsibility—indeed, a duty—to consider what will happen to that body of people even after we apply all the other remedies to the market. It seems to me that this particular remedy for the period after the absolute price cap ends may actually address that issue of sticky customers continuing not to switch.

Let me give hon. Members an idea of what is happening in the market today. As we might expect, among the 60-plus companies making a tariff offer in the market, there is an upwards curve in basic tariffs. The annual cost of a dual fuel tariff ranges from about £800 to £1,200 for some of the green tariffs we discussed. If we look at those companies’ tariff ranges—I will not mention names—we see that one company that starts at the lower end with an initial tariff offer of a little over £800 has a tariff range of up to £1,150, another company that offers an initial tariff of just over £900 has a tariff range of up to £1,200, and a company that starts at just under £900 has a tariff range of up to £1,150. That indicates that, at the moment, the slope of a company’s initial tariff bears no relation to its tariff range. Indeed, some companies have very good tariff ranges—Members might be surprised to hear some of their names—whereas other companies, which Members might have a rather more benign view of, actually have huge tariff ranges. So the question of tariff range and how that may affect sticky customers is a question not just of there being bad companies doing this and good companies not doing it, but of it being reasonably endemic across the range of companies offering a relatively low initial tariff but having a very high tariff range structure in their arrangements.