Member Article

FSB welcomes Ofgem's energy proposals

Ofgem has announced its proposals to give smaller firms a fairer deal in the energy market through its Retail Market Review.

The Federation of Small Businesses in the North East welcomes these proposals especially as rising utility prices is one of the biggest issues that small businesses are facing across the region.

Small businesses will be pleased that ofgem is looking closely at how they interact with the energy market and we welcome the determination to give small firms a fairer deal. Proposals to increase the number of micro and small businesses protected by existing safeguards are good news. However, we want to see a regular review of the proposed £10,000 energy spend threshold in case it needs to be increased.

We support moves to make small business customers more aware of when their contract ends. However, we want to see the practice of rollovers, which can lock small businesses into uncompetitive contracts, abolished once and for all when Ofgem has completed its ongoing work in this area.

We were hoping to see more concrete action to make it easier for small firms to switch suppliers. We also note that Ofgem has announced measures to allow household customers to be able to compare ‘like for like’ tariffs across the market.

While we appreciate the non-domestic energy market has different characteristics to the domestic market, we would like to see small firms better able to compare one energy supplier’s prices to another. However, careful thought needs to be given to how this could be done without it simply leading to price fixing among the big six energy suppliers.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Hanson .