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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that administrators of failed energy companies pay back debts to customers in the form of account credit balances before paying the secured creditors of energy suppliers that fail in future.

Under the Supplier of Last Resort process domestic consumers have their balances honoured when they transfer to a new supplier.

BEIS is working with Ofgem to understand how certain assets in an insolvency could be protected, and therefore to reduce the costs that eventually fall on customers when a supplier exits the market.