Correct, although choosing the wrong deal doesn't necessarily equate to "being shafted"







Correct. It's a subsidy on idiocy.

That is not what Cameron said. He said he would force companies to [igive[/i their customers the companies lowest tariff.



What would the effect of this be:



"I asked the boss of one of the UK's biggest energy companies what would happen if they were forced by the government to give all their customers the lowest tariff they offer."



"It is very simple" he said. "If we could not adjust charges depending on how people pay, we would have to raise our basic price".



from here



[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19997139[/url



In other words Cameron's idea removes the kind of market you allude to in your post.



What this episode illustrates though is the market that does exist is a sham and is only there because the companies manage to rip people off precisely because some people do not qualify for a companies lowest tariff.



The other glaring problem is if say British Gas came out with the lowest industry-wide tariff for Gas then given they would be compelled to offer that tariff to all their customers. The logical result of that is the entire gas consumer population would switch to British Gas and all the other suppliers would go bust!



This farce and the rail franchise one ought to have the Labour party considering the re-introduction of clause 4!

Cameron was an utter fool to bleat this one out.



There is no reason I can think of in principle why utilities alone should be compelled to offer their "best price" to every customer. That is, if you accept that these are just businesses like any other.



I believe that Cameron whinged because the thought occurred to him, while standing at the despatch box, that in fact energy is a distress purchase, everybody needs to keep warm and to cook etc., and so why should they be fleeced by suppliers in the name of greedy profits.



Well Dave, this is what you get if you sell off the family silver. Maybe once you've cracked this one, you can make sure every train traveller gets the same price cheapest ticket too.

I honestly think that he'd been briefed recently on the voluntary code of practice that the suppliers have signed up to in which they state that they will write to each customer once a year and inform them of what is their cheapest tariff, leaving the decision up to the customer as to whether or not to change - they fulfill their promise just by informing you once a year.



I think that in his mind while he was struggling for a good news response to beat the opposition down with, the utilities discussion came to mind and he decided that rather than being a voluntary code he'd rather like to make it law.



And then he opened his mouth and some different words came out that afterwards, with proper consideration, actually meant something completely different so that his pleb underlings have had to do a bit of sidestepping since.



Its all born of the crazy point-scoring exercise that passes for "debate" in the Commons - why on earth they just don't put an hour aside every Tuesday for all the MPs to have a punch up across the woolsack is beyond me, it would achieve far more and be a lot more entertaining on TV than watching public schoolboys trying to win the school debating medal for shouting the loudest.

A bit off topic but this is something I've been wondering for a while, so hopefully someone can explain.



How is it that the energy companies know what proportion of energy I've used at on and off peak times, yet they don't have a clue how much I've used in total without me first telling them?

Maybe because the woolsack is in the House of Lords?

Off topic, but Cameron is a dreadful public speaker and this just smacks of a flustered policy announcement, like Osborne's Greggs tax, announced by a PM desperate to say something that Daily Mail readers will lap up

I listened to PMQs (as I usually do) and was struck more by his pathetic reply to Chris Bryant's question:



Bryant asked: "Why won't the prime minister publish all the texts, emails and other formers of correspondence between himself and his office, and Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson and News International … so that we can judge whether they are relevant? Is it because they are too salacious and embarrassing for the prime minister or is it because there's one rule for the prime minister and another one for the rest of us?"



Cameron told MPs they should remember that Bryant had "stood up in this House and read out a whole lot of Leveson information that was under embargo that he was not meant to read out, much of which turned out about me to be untrue."



He went on: "And he has never apologised. Do you know what, [uuntil he apologises I am not going to answer his questions[/u."



Sorry but if that is the best the leader of our nation can manage, then the petulant little 2@ should sit down and shut up

Lack of price transparency is a major problem in energy markets and also with things like mobile phones. When consumers can't compare prices between sellers easily it means sellers can take advantage of buyers lacking information and can hike up their prices.



One thing that always amuses me is how the right wingers always like to say how the free market is best. If there are issues like the minimum wage or trade union rights the right wingers jump up and down and say "this is interfering with the free market".



But they are strangely lukewarm at campaigning on issues like this - or a lot of the behaviours in the banking sector which are based on taking advantage of uninformed customers in exactly the same way.

so, let me get this straight, the pm (a tory who kills babies and kittens) comes out and says that at the end of a customers fixed rate term, the energy company should automatically put the customer on their lowest available tariff (as opposed to the 2nd highest one that e.on just shoved me on) and people are complaining he's a fool for saying it because they think the energy companies will just hike the prices and form a cartel unlike what they've been doing for years?

Has anybody who has so far posted actually looked at the chart accompanying the article? Retail margins are not the cause of ever-increasing power bills - rising costs are.



Some of those costs are avoidable to a degree - customer churn (i.e. changing suppliers) costs a fortune (all the companies spend a lot of money chasing and retaining customers which, oddly enough gets added everybody's bill and in the end is a zero-sum game), as does renewable energy (in the UK a significant component of the wholesale energy cost and much more expensive than fossil fuels) and supply reliability (if people were willing to accept a less reliable electricity system some costs could come down considerably).



The real question to me is why aren't people given the right information to make choices? For example, do you want to pursue green energy policies, or do you want to abandon them and pay lower bills? Would you accept lower electricity system reliability (e.g. say outage 20 hours a year) in return for a £ saving?



All of these things can and should be quantified so people can make informed choices. As it is, too many of the debates are hijacked by politics (in the case of green energy) or simple inability to question orthodoxy (reliability is king).

Well thats even better, I'd pay with my own money to see two aged Lords in Ermine thumping each other with windmill arms over a sack of wool - and the aftermath of holding best steak to cartoon black eyes and bags of ice held to heads would be even better.