Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to encourage consumers to switch energy providers.

The number of customers switching between energy suppliers continues to increase – approximately 7.8 million energy switches took place in 2016 - an increase of nearly 1.7 million on 2015.

The Government worked with Ofgem and industry to change the industry rules so that it is now possible for customers to switch suppliers in up to 21 days. This has been enshrined as the minimum standard in the Energy Switch Guarantee, launched in June 2016. Prior to this it took around 5 weeks to switch.

We continue to work with Energy UK who administer the Guarantee to strengthen and promote it to give consumers greater confidence that the process of switching energy supplier will be simple, speedy and safe.

We are working closely with Ofgem on their switching programme to enable consumers to switch their energy supplier reliably and quickly delivering next day switching as a new industry standard and improving reliability of the switching process through better management and oversight of industry data.

The Government has provided £1.3m funding for the Big Energy Saving Network and Big Energy Saving Week this winter to fund third sector organisations and community groups, to support vulnerable consumers so they can switch and save.