Founder and chief executive officer of People’s Energy, David Pike, doesn’t believe that the Conservative pledge on energy prices will have much effect on consumers, if it happens at all.
Experience has taught him that when you’re dealing with energy companies like British Gas, EDF, and Scottish Power, sometimes even the worlds of the Prime Minister will fall on deaf ears.
“I think it may be a good thing but my experience says: let’s see what happens. The Conservatives seem to talk a good game but will The Big Six just put their prices up anyway, ahead of [the price cap]? Indications are that as The Big Six learned that there was a potential cap coming they cynically put their prices up anyway, ahead of time, in order to get some cushion in the system.”
“I’m not totally convinced that it will actually happen, or whether the mechanism will be effective or not. I welcome anything that introduces fairness and justice into the market but it’s been promised, on and off the table a few times, and nothing much has actually happened so I’m a little sceptical I suppose.”
Running an energy company with just one tariff, the People’s Energy CEO – who started the company with wife Karin – doesn’t believe that energy has to be as complicated and convoluted as The Big Six have helped to make it.
Pike’s company’s mantra is to ‘bring back trust in the energy market’ yet what he’s seen from the big energy companies falls rather short in his estimation of transparency.
He said: “[Energy] doesn’t have to be the price that it is. I think they’ve built huge systems, they’ve got lots of people and they’ve made it really complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got nine people, that’s we need at the moment to service all our customers.”
“The Big Six operate a model that people don’t trust. Energy is a basic human need, pretty much, so why should those things that mean so much to us have such high profits attached to them?”
Pike’s mistrust of The Big Six is what informs his view that Theresa May’s announcement during Wednesday’s Tory conference won’t hold much sway when the companies themselves come calling.
The Prime Minister said: “While we are in favour of free markets, we will always take action to fix them when they are broken. We will always take on monopolies and vested interests when they are holding people back. One of the greatest examples in Britain today is the broken energy market.
“That’s why next week this Government will publish a draft Bill to put a price cap on energy bills, meeting our manifesto promise and bringing an end to rip-off energy prices once and for all.”
Yet, Pike feels we’ve heard these promises before, and it’s unlikely anything will meaningful will be done to impede the reign of The Big Six energy companies.
He and his wife have built People’s Energy on a completely opposite business model – where the consumer is king, and the supplier does just that, supplies.
“As soon as you make the shareholders different to the customers inherently that business model and decision making is compromised. What we want is people to want to stay with us.”
“I don’t think this announcement will change the amount of trust that people have for The Big Six energy providers. There’s an Ofgem statistic that 43% of consumers don’t trust their energy supplier to act fairly. That’s 43% of the electorate you can communicate with on something that matters to them in a sound bite, it’s an easy win. Just a political football.”
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