After a year that has seen a significant influx of customers finding themselves in increasingly difficult financial circumstances, the debate surrounding consumer vulnerability in the utilities sector has reached a new intensity. Following the implementation of swift measures to protect the most vulnerable at the start of the pandemic, the focus is now on what longer-term strategies might look like.
Utility Week speaks to six experts and asks what they want to see from the sector as a whole to better tackle the issue of vulnerability.
Matthew Vickers, chief executive of the Energy Ombudsman
Consumer vulnerability is all about the bigger picture, be that within individual organisations or wider society, according to Matthew Vickers.
The Ombudsman chief wants companies to join up their approaches to vulnerability across their whole operating model, ensuring staff are given the right leadership and support to allow them to better support vulnerable customers.
“It’s about getting their wider business to understand some of the challenges, and the importance of, customer service”, he says.
“One of the key things we all talk about is being able to spot vulnerability and being able to get people to open up, to trust you so that you can help with that. That’s quite a challenge at the best of times because it needs a really high level of customer service, empathy and skill. It’s even more so at the moment, as we’ve talked before about the pressures of Covid falling on workforces as much as they do on customers”, he adds.
He further points to the need for better signposting when companies have reached the limit of what they can offer.
“It’s really important that, as far as we can, we join up the resources and the skills and capabilities that are there in the system better. That does involve looking cross-utility and what can be done cross-sector. Also, looking at what can be done across the private and public sectors. We should remember it’s the same challenges around things like council tax bills and broadband. If we are starting from the person rather than the sector, the more that we can look at providing that support on a whole person level the better.”
Additionally, Vickers believes if it is a question of customers not having enough money to pay bills after they are offered as much help as is reasonably expected from their energy retailer, there is an opportunity for companies to link affordability issues with carbon reduction.
“One of the other ways that you can look at affordability is to reduce usage, which should have a benefit from a carbon point of view because if you can cut energy usage, that’s great. That gets you into energy efficiency, recognising that these problems are linked. If you can tackle the efficiency problem through better, through more efficient housing, that in itself helps to tackle the usage question which helps to tackle the affordability question.”
Janine Shackleton, policy manager at the Consumer Council for Water
Removing the communication barriers to accessing support is a key area for CCWater’s policy manager Janine Shackleton.
Shackleton points to the consumer group’s Water Matters research which showed that awareness of the support offered by water companies to customers in vulnerable circumstances remains low despite the growing demand for it. 
She adds: “There are a number of barriers which currently stand in the way of some customers accessing support. These include lack of awareness, lack of trust, fear of form filling, low literacy, emotional and language barriers and disabilities.
“We need to tackle and remove the communication barriers between water companies and the communities they serve to ensure everyone is aware of the support that exists and how to access it when they need it.”
Shackleton believes her sector needs to be better at sharing data, and says water companies are ‘data poor’ as they do not have contracts with their customers.
She continues: “‘Distant’ customer relationships present a risk in that vulnerable customers may not be aware of the support available and/or trust their supplier to help them. Water companies are ‘data poor’ as they don’t have contracts with their customers. Improved data sharing and data matching is essential to identifying who could need support.”
Communicating with customers during a disruption to service is seen by Shackleton as a form of aid in itself. She says her organisation wants to make sure consumers get easy to understand information via the communication channels they use.
“We are collaborating with water companies to help them understand the communication preferences of communities and to establish the water company as a trusted source of information and support.
“We will also play our part in creating information notes on what to expect for consumers and doing more to understand people’s experiences of incidents by using our local networks and deploying other techniques such as more formal research.”
Elizabeth Blakelock, principal policy manager, Citizens Advice
Citizens Advice’s principal policy manager, Elizabeth Blakelock, has three overall wishes for consumer vulnerability and ensuring customers have a range of contact options available is her number one.
“The first is to make it easy to get in touch with an omnichannel approach that includes telephone. 
“The second is an intensification of collaboration, this came out really clearly from Utility Week’s debt and vulnerability conference, it’s sharing experiences of reaching consumers in vulnerable circumstances and looking at examples across industry so that we can get good practice far quicker across the board.
“And the third one is listening, listening directly to consumers in vulnerable circumstances, accessing research like ours that articulates people’s experiences and then using that research and insight, not just leaving it on a shelf, using it to make sure that products are accessible and that our industry is inclusive by design.”
Utility Week recently interviewed Elizabeth Blakelock. You can read more here.
Adam Scorer, chief executive of National Energy Action
NEA’s chief executive Adam Scorer wants to see more of companies offering support to those in need, including debt repayment breathing space.
However, he adds: “I still see too much requirement for customers to be the ones to approach suppliers for support. For the general consumer mass that’s right but if you have people on the priority services register and you know why they are, I still think there’s more that companies can do to proactively check in with those customers, to make sure there’s something that can be done for them, especially over the winter. 
“For those companies who have built up a stock of smart prepayment customers I’m really hoping they are doing the data analytics where they are able to spot rationing, self-disconnection, signs that people who are at home just aren’t using the gas or, if it’s an electrically heated home, electricity that you would expect people to be using over the winter.”
Furthermore, Scorer would like to see more being done with debt repayment matching schemes. Specifically, he believes there is scope for the government to match repayment through Fuel Direct, where utility payments are taken directly out of benefits payments.
Matthew Cole, chair of the Fuel Bank Foundation
Matthew Cole, chair of trustees at the Fuel Bank Foundation, believes energy companies must seek out other organisations and not try and do all the work themselves.
Cole previously worked as head of vulnerability at Npower, which created a partnership with Macmillan which would see the cancer charity offer advice to customers with cancer who are struggling with their energy bills. 
He says: “For energy companies it’s about working in those places where people are most likely to go to, making sure services and propositions you offer to support people are available through those organisations too.
“We talk a lot about signposting, for me it’s about more than signposting, it’s making sure that energy companies invest in community-based organisations, or organisations that have a presence in the community at least, and use those to get to those people who are hard to engage with and hard to reach.”
“My call for energy companies is – do not try and do everything yourself, think about the partnerships you could create and develop and how those partners can help you get services to people who need them”, he adds.
Finally, Utility Week speaks to the chair of the Committee on Fuel Poverty who outlines what he wants to see from a government perspective.
David Blakemore, chair of the Committee on Fuel Poverty
A big push by the Committee on Fuel Poverty has been to improve the targeting of assistance to pay fuel bills and install energy efficiency measures for those most in need. Currently less than 15 per cent of programme budgets are received by fuel poor households.
The committee’s chair, David Blakemore, believes harnessing data is a key step to ensuring help is automatically given to those who need it. 
He explains: “With ECO, warm home discount and the winter fuel payment, the data is available within government to identify those who are most in need. It’s a case of sourcing the various bits of data to put that picture together. The Digital Economy Act passed in 2017 allows government to take data from a number of sources to make better use of it.
“One of our big recommendations at the moment as a committee is to make better use of the data we have to identify and to automatically pay benefits such as the winter fuel payment and warm home discount to those most in need and automatically make them eligible for programmes such as ECO.
“That has a number of benefits. Firstly it improves the targeting of the existing budgets on those most in need and it would reduce the finding costs significantly for programmes like ECO. It would also enable part of the current budgets that are used to help pay fuel bills to be switched onto improving energy efficiency, a move which is supported by the Committee on Climate Change.
“Additionally one of the arguments against means testing is that often eligible households won’t apply but if you have proper use of data in government they won’t have to apply, they’ll automatically receive it.”
Ultimately Blakemore believes the government needs to better coordinate the use of available data.
“There needs to be more political will to use the data available and there is a need for resources to be put on it. It has to come from government, driven and coordinated from the centre”, he adds.