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Choosing a New Gas Supplier — a Case Study
28/09/1997
The following report is a genuine case study in the second pilot area for residential gas competition. Our correspondent wrote to us twice: firstly to tell us of his first application to Midlands Gas, and then of his decision to change to ScottishPower. The “simplified table on the page opposite shows the numerical analysis behind his choice.
Part One — The application to Midlands Gas (late 1996/early 1997) I suggested to our church council last year that, with the second pilot area due to start in March 1997, we should be looking to change our gas supplier. With our annual bill of over £1,100, a considerable saving was there for the taking.
I had the impression that I was just about the only one who had heard of gas competition; after assuring people that there was no need to buy and install a new meter (I don’t think anyone actually asked about the cost of a new service pipe), and that we could continue to have our temperamental boiler serviced by dear old Fred from British Gas, I was charged to do some research.
At that stage, only two suppliers (Beacon and Total/LEB) had come to my attention through mail shots or local adverts, and, against an annual consumption of 2400 therms on the best British Gas tariff (“direct pay”), I was disappointed with their savings of under 10%. I knew there would be other suppliers hiding their lights under a bushel and a telephone call to Ofgas resulted in an information sheet listing all nine companies licensed for the second pilot area. How the picture changed! The seven shy suppliers were all cheaper by a long way than the two for whom I already had details. Seven phone calls resulted in tariff and payment details and I asked them all to send their full information packs to me; surprisingly, three failed to do so and thus on customer service grounds ruled themselves out of further consideration. At the next council meeting, I presented comparative figures which showed that we could save as much as £225/year. I answered questions on procedures for terminating contracts. Final assurances that, no matter from whom we purchased our gas, the same molecules would flow through our meter, and if our supplier went under the gas would still flow, led to a decision to change.
However, I don’t have complete confidence that all will go well as our latest bill from British Gas is so old it does not contain our M-number, which our new supplier needs. I obtained a number from British Gas Trading over the phone but as I did not have a TGB reference number – only one from the old regional billing system – this caused problems at the other end and I sensed the person I was speaking to was getting confused between the church and the vicarage. My bet is that I’ve been given the M-number for the vicarage – a separate customer — and that it is the Vicar who will benefit from all my hard work! Hopefully all the paperwork has now been sent off by our secretary and all I have to do is read the meter as early as possible on 7th March – just in case British Gas, or do I mean BG plc or Centrica plc, cannot get round to read thousands of meters on that day. A final thought. Does the lack of a recent bill mean that our church account got lost in the move from the old billing system to TGB – and if we had stayed put would we have received another bill from British Gas? We will never know!
Part Two — Bring back the Gas Board and its monopoly (March 1997) It must be easier to enter heaven through the eye of a needle than to get Midlands Gas (MG) to take you on as a customer. That’s my experience after trying to get MG to supply my parish church and my own house. Let’s start with the church. The application went off in January, in plenty of time to meet the 7 March competition date for mid-Sussex. Weeks went by and nothing was heard. Telephone calls were made to see if the application had been received but no one could trace it. At our church council meeting in March our secretary reported that MG had lost our application; it was unanimously agreed to change to Scottish Power. Then the very next day, 6 March, we received a letter from MG; it was dated 12 Feb and the reference on the letter contained the text 05-Feb-97 amongst its 25 alphanumeric characters. It gets worse: our church was asked to sign a “regulated credit agreement” which we were told would delay the whole process by another 30 days! I have also cancelled my own application with MG. I too was asked to sign a “regulated credit agreement” – advised to me in a letter dated 23 January and received on the 20 Feb. I too have now applied to Scottish Power. Life was so much simpler when we just had the Gas Board . . .
Editor’s postscript: Just in case the folks at Scottish Power are feeling smug about Midlands Gas’s misfortune, our correspondent phoned as we were going to press to tell us that he was one of the estimated 1,000 customers affected by ScottishPower’s recent customer database problems. Whoops again!