Pre-payment: Meters

(asked on 5th June 2020) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how many households in (a) Linlithgow and East Falkirk constituency, (b) Scotland and (c) the UK have prepayment meters; and what the change in the number of such meters was in each of those areas over the last five years.


Answered by
Kwasi Kwarteng Portrait
Kwasi Kwarteng
This question was answered on 15th June 2020

The latest Ofgem data on Prepayment Meters (PPM) shows that there are 4.3 million customers using PPM meters, which represents around 15% of all customers in Great Britain.

Neither Ofgem nor the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy routinely collect regional PPM customer numbers However, in 2017 BIES collected a one off local authority area breakdown, which showed there were 460,529 PPM customers in Scotland, 14,008 PPM customers in the Falkirk Council local authority area and 13,143 for the West Lothian Council local authority area. This data does not include customers who pay for their gas using a PPM as this data has not been compiled, however there are fewer gas PPMs as a whole in the market.

The number of Prepayment Meter accounts in the GB energy market over the last five years has remained around 4.5 million. There has, however been an increase in competition in the PPM market over the past five years with PPM specialists providing greater choice for consumers beyond the six large suppliers. A cap on PPM prices was introduced in April 2017 and remains in force.

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