Sample News Story
Britain Launches Residential Gas Experiment
28/04/1996
In a trickle rather than a tide, under 30,000 residential gas customers in the South Western region of England waved good-bye to British Gas (Supply) and signed up to take their gas from one of the new suppliers licensed to sell gas to them and to the 470,000 of their neighbours who declined to join them in the experiment. Gas will still flow through British Gas (TransCo) pipes. The first day of competitive supply is April 29.
This level of uptake is, of course, bad news for the revenues of the companies which saturated the area with advertising (mainly Total, Amerada Hess and SWEB, the local electricity monopoly), but probably good news for the experiment as a whole: a low uptake, just as most people in this mild climate zone were turning off their central heating boilers for six months, will mean information systems are more likely to cope and smooth out wrinkles than if the wild estimates of the government (100,000 or more eager switchers on Day One) had come true and if supply had been harder to arrange.
So why has the switch rate (6%) been so low and what do these customers get? The rate has probably been slowed by fears over hard-sell stories and the sheer bother of reading small print, changing to an unknown supply contract with new mysterious strings attached. This will no doubt ease over time. British Gas has not had to compete on price to retain customers, but rather has been able simply to advise its loyal customers to read the fine print and consider the confusion spread by the newcomers.
And what do the switched customers get? They get to receive their bill from a different company and pay a few pence less for their summer cooking gas. The big test and the big deal will come later, in winter. Still, as even getting this far is light years ahead of the plodding British telephone and electricity industries, it is quite an achievement.