Charities have highlighted confusion over how the Energy Price Guarantee will work, with some consumers mistakenly believing they will not be charged above the £2,500 headline figure.
Following last week’s announcement that unit rates will be capped to limit annual energy bills for a typical household to £2,500 over a two-year period, Fuel Bank Foundation boss Matt Cole said he is worried about vulnerable customers misinterpreting the guarantee.
He told Utility Week: “What we’re seeing now in our Fuel Bank network, I really worry. I was at a Fuel Bank centre a couple of days ago where somebody was telling me that ‘it is really hard that prices have gone up, but the prime minister has said that it’s going to be £2,500. So once I get to £2,500 worth of top-ups it’s great, the rest of it is for free’.
“And then I start to really panic because that’s the challenge, that people just don’t really understand what the new price freeze really means. It’s just another price cap in effect, but we’ve called it a price freeze.”
Cole said that as a result, his organisation is about to launch an information campaign to “spell out” what the guarantee means for prepayment meter customers, as well as what it does not.
Sharing similar concerns is Frazer Scott, chief executive of Energy Action Scotland, who said the detail from the government “hasn’t been very clear”, referencing recent confusion around how customers on fixed tariffs would be treated.
“I know that very few people were probably on fixed deals in comparison to the market as a whole. But nonetheless, the fact that that was very unclear says a lot in the current circumstances,” Scott told Utility Week.
He added: “I’ll be honest, I think the communications around all the interventions the government has tried to introduce have been poor, genuinely poor.
“People are still trying to work out how they’re going to receive the £400, as BEIS called it, discount, albeit that it is being delivered in about four or five different ways to households, depending on your circumstances, depending on your supplier.”
Both charities have raised further concerns about customer safety, with reports some are resorting to dangerous methods in an attempt to save money, such as by refusing gas engineers entry into their homes to conduct safety checks.
Cole said Fuel Bank Foundation’s campaign will also include safety advice as a result.
He added: “They have to put all the burners on the cooker on, to make sure the gas is flowing without any oxygen leaking into it to show the pipes are fine. People are refusing to let people in the door for the gas safety inspection, just for the pure cost of the gas which will be used in that safety check.
“We’ve got people who talk about managing their way through it by burning wood in fireplaces, there might not be a safe chimney in so there’s a carbon monoxide risk. People are talking about using barbecues now for cooking. Barbecuing in summer is fine but if you bring a barbecue indoors, which people have talked about doing, it releases carbon monoxide.”
Scott added that his organisation heard reports last winter of people burning furniture to keep warm, as well as burning clothes and also ripping up floorboards in order to burn them.
He added: “There’s every risk that people will do desperate things which can cause catastrophic injury to themselves or potentially to others as a result of where we are now…people who are desperate just do desperate things.
“We are irrational creatures when it comes to this. And there is a real terrifying prospect of the things that people may do. But one of the most terrifying prospects is that people will do absolutely nothing and they will have no heat in the winter months.”
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