It’s Time To Make MORE Noise – We're Contacting Our Local MPs!

Last month we raised over 1,300 complains to Ofgem, and less than 3 weeks later Ofgem contacted me to meet their Director of Retail! Clearly, making noise works, so it’s time to get government involved. Part of this petition includes the government removing VAT from our energy bills, so it’s time to let them know what we want.

I’d like to ask all of you to send a complaint email to your local MP. If they receive thousands of complaints on the same day with the same message, they’ll have to pay attention. 

To find your local MP’s email address, go to: https://members.parliament.uk/members/Commons and type in your post code. Click the MP that pops up and their email address will be in a box labelled “Parliamentary Office”. You can just click that email address and it will open a new message for you with their email address filled in to the “Send” section.

Please add my email address as a CC: richard@over50smoney.com

Please set the subject to “Complaint: Change the Price Cap Formula”

Then copy and paste the message below into the text of your email:

Good afternoon, 

I’ve signed a petition for Ofgem to review and change the price cap formula and for the UK government to scrap VAT on retail domestic energy bills. The petition has now gathered over 215,000 signatures and is still growing. You can view the petition here: https://www.change.org/OfgemPriceCap

I am emailing you to request that you raise the issues identified in this petition with the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Grant Shapps, and with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt.

We request that both of these individuals review both the broken Ofgem Price Cap and the necessity of VAT being added to domestic energy bills during an energy crisis.

As it stands, VAT accounts for £169 of the Price Cap figure, whereas just 1 year ago it was only £61. From April, we can expect this VAT figure to approach £200 per household!

Additionallu, with the government’s Energy Price Guarantee and Ofgem’s flawed price cap formula, we’ll see billions of pounds of public money being spent on record-breaking profit levels for private energy companies. The Price Cap formula inflates energy costs by giving higher allowances and profit figures to energy suppliers during a crisis:

o   EBIT (profit) – setting EBIT as a percentage of costs means energy suppliers are being rewarded for having higher costs and, with the complete absence of fixed rate tariffs available, they are incentivised to keep their costs rising rather than trying to reduce costs

o   Headroom – Headroom allowance is also set as a percentage of costs, this is providing excessive and unnecessary headroom in the market, which is assigned to cover any specific costs so is used by energy suppliers as additional profit.

As the Energy Price Guarantee is already in effect, I would like to stress the importance of reviewing the price cap formula and VAT QUICKLY. The longer you wait, the more public money is being wasted on excessive supplier profit levels. 

I look forward to your response. 

Kind regards

[enter your name]

I’ll be posting a few updates this week, apologies but with all the media looking at the Autumn Budget and Ofgem’s next price cap announcement, now is the perfect time for us to raise awareness of the issues we’re seeing!

Keep an eye out for the update tomorrow as well, there’s one other thing we need to do together this week to get our Government’s attention.

Thank you all for the support, the only reason I got that meeting with Ofgem last week is because of the work you all put in by bringing awareness to this petition and emailing Ofgem. Please do send the email above as well, I know it's a lot of work but together we're going to make real changes that benefit all of us. 

Please keep sharing the petition online and talking about it with everyone! The more people we can get to sign, the more noise we can make! 

Thank you to everyone that does this, please do CC me in so I can keep track of how many complaints we’re able to raise.

Thanks all,

Richard Winstone