It’s tempting to be harsh on Spark – and the company has certainly come under fire in the mainstream press, including featuring on a BBC Watchdog documentary. But Spark, which now has 200 employees, at the time of the breach had far fewer – and no well-staffed compliance department. Yet multinational corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees and access to the world’s best regulatory lawyers have consistently flouted consumer protection rules to the point where they have had to pay out tens of millions
of pounds in fines and compensation – yes, big six, we’re talking about you.
No, two wrongs don’t make a right – but can it be fair to expect higher standards of compliance from start-up businesses with straitened resources than we do from the industry’s leaders? Such behaviour is unacceptable from either, of course, but Spark’s experience does highlight one of the major challenges faced by would-be market entrants. Not only do they face the hurdles of the wholesale market, they also have to negotiate Byzantine regulation that some of the world’s biggest businesses can’t manage to stay on the right side of. The barrier to entry this raises is one of those unintended consequences of regulation that the Competition and Markets Authority will need to examine in its inquiry into the market (see page 15).
If it is decided that a diverse and competitive market is the best solution to the crisis around energy supply (and that is not a foregone conclusion), then surely some extra support should be provided for those smaller market entrants that will make up the competition.