Avro Energy, which was USwitch's best-value-for-money energy provider in 2019 and has 1.2m customers, is in financial difficulties, having defaulted on the industry's balancing and settlement code (which is in essence the scheme to satisfy demand for energy that is more than ...
what a company has contracted to buy). An announcement on how customers will be protected is expected from the regulator Ofgem. Normally those customers would be transferred to bigger, less fragile companies under the Supplier of Last Resort Scheme, but it is possible a...
special administrator would have to be appointed. I am told three other much smaller energy businesses are in trouble. The cost of these rescues, plus this week's of People's Energy, would be well over £1bn (industry sources put them at £1.1bn), and would be passed on to all...
of us through our bills. This is as much a cost-of-living crisis as a markets failure. Ofgem refused to comment. I tried to contact Avro but their number was disconnected and the "live chat" facility was down.
Ofgem has just announced that Avro and Green energy are ceasing to trade. Avro in fact has 580,000 customers and not the 1.2m I was told (which may be meter points). Green has 255,000 customers. This is a lot of customers
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Under the “supplier of last resort” scheme to protect customers of failed energy companies, every rescued customer of a failed energy company costs the rescuing company £600 to £700 to “on board”, which they have the right to reclaim over 15 to 24 months from every…
energy customer in the country. In other words the costs of customers’ mistakes in buying energy from fragile businesses are “socialised”. As I said earlier this week there has to be a debate about how fair it is that all UK households will pay a big price for failed businesses…
and whether this is a grotesque failure of a regulatory system imposed by the Conservative government. These socialised costs are already significant - around £40 per customer just on the basis of the handful of firms (Avro, Green etc) that have failed…
I cannot see how even cheap government loans are remotely going to fix this problem of crashing energy companies. Because the fundamental problem is that energy customers are MASSIVELY loss making for energy suppliers that haven’t hedged their gas supply commitments. That’s…
true for those businesses failing now and any big company that might take on those stranded customers. So why would big companies ride to the rescue? I can’t see it. Unless that is government were to legislate to allow the price cap next spring to rise way beyond…
even the current doubling in market prices, such that today’s losses were offset by tomorrow’s super profits. But that would crush living standards and be politically disastrous for the Tories. So one way or another this government is going to end up pumping billions…
As someone who has just got through Covid-19, I wondered how rare I am to have contracted it as a double vaxxed person. According to new data from the government’s Vaccine Surveillance Report, in the age group 40 to 79, the overwhelming majority of those infected have…
been double vaxxed (see attached). I was surprised by what looks like high prevalence among the double vaxxed. And according to leading scientists at least part of the explanation is that “vaccine efficacy is not as good as we would like for the Delta variant”. Now it …
is important to remember that severe disease is considerably less common among the vaccinated infected than among the unvaxxed. But I am surprised these statistics have received so little attention and have occasioned so little debate. If the return to school leads to…
Cabinet government has become a very degraded thing. Last time I checked, 45 minutes ago, cabinet ministers had still not been told whether the PM’s plan to announce tomorrow two breaches of his 2019 election manifesto would even be on the formal agenda for discussion at the…
8.30am cabinet meeting. BUT as of now, @BorisJohnson is going ahead with 1) a manifesto-breaking 1.25% national insurance rise to raise circa £10bn and fill a circa £15bn hole in health and social care provision; b) a new cap-and-floor system, based on Dilnot, to limit to circa…
£80k the amount an individual would have to contribute to their own care (the cap), and to protect approx £100k of their savings from any care costs (the floor); c) a temporary waiver, which will require legislation, of the manifesto-guaranteed “triple lock” on…
In case you didn’t know - and I didn’t till a senior government official told me - the daily tally of infections seriously understates the actual number of infections, because if you are sick with Covid19 today but had it any time in the past (even last spring) your new bout…
is not included in the daily dashboard figures. We know people are being reinfected. And if the pandemic were to be spreading - which it might be - from first infected school children to second infected adults, we would not see that change in real time. This is profoundly…
troubling. And although it probably remains true, as I said on Friday, that we are past the peak of the pre 19 July surge, the inadequacy of the daily measurement data undermines confidence. As I understand it, there is deep disquiet among officials that the dashboard stats…
While @chedwardes was interviewing the el-Kurd twins in East Jerusalem, I filmed this outside their house. It gives you a flavour of the stress of their lives as settlers’ use the courts to seize possession of homes their families were given in 1956 as compensation for being…
evicted from West Jerusalem. Under Israeli law they have no equivalent right to evict those who now occupy their ancestral homes in West Jerusalem. The property rights are asymmetric. And here you can see the police compelling a Palestinian to bring down a Palestinian flag…
attached to a kite. Imagine the police doing that in London to someone flying the England or Scotland flag. This is not like living in any old middle class road, though it is certainly middle class, because all the Palestinians I met in Sheikh Jarrah were highly educated,…