Utility Point has collapsed today, following PFP Energy and MoneyPlus Energy. It seems that with the price of power, particularly electricity, increasing rapidly they can't get the money in quickly enough to pay for the power their customers are consuming when it is due. The email from UP forecasts that more will follow soon.
bugger, I'm with them ... no doubt the advice is not to try and move until ofgem find a stand-in, still they're relatively cheap until then
I am not affected, just curious - It doesn't explain whether in the interim, whether you will be on the contracted rate agreed with the company which went bust, or some new temporary rate.
I'm also with a small supplier who appears still to be in business and have a very favourable (for me) tariff :)
I don't the answer to that but something else I read today
[quote]I've talked about cheap fixes above, but the operative word there is CHEAP (although nothing is truly cheap right now), as only variable tariffs need to fall within the price cap.
Horrifyingly, Scottish Power has a fix lasting just over a year which is
20% higher than the new price cap. Prices would need to rise roughly 50% next April before that was worth doing - ridiculous.And it's not alone. Other biggies, including Shell, Octopus, British Gas, EDF and SSE, all have some fixes above the price cap too (though those lasting longer are less bad). So don't just go for your supplier's fix, instead it's better to do a whole-of-market cheap fix comparison. [/quote]
#hiya
I in the end opted for edf which is three years but a bit more than I was paying but about the same as this next rise, gambling this is the first of many rises which will make the best out of a bad job.
The costs involved in trying to keep up with the demand while trying to be green are in many ways the issue here I suppose, considering that without the ability to make some profit nobody would be in the energy market at all!
Brian
Yes, I joined Utility Point on a fixed deal, when it ran out they rolled me onto a standard variable that wasn't a rip-off, and I don't think it has actually ever varied, and now it's cheaper than anything the comparison sites can find ... then they wonder why they go bust?
It's predicted that the recent price cap rise (for variable tariffs) announcement will be followed in 6 months time by a similar announcement for another equivalent rise.
In recent years some of the smaller companies have stayed afloat and offered better deals than some of the much bigger suppliers. What seems to have killed them this time is prices increasing 4x higher than RPI and possible 8x time higher than RPI in 6 to 9 months time.
alan_m pretended :
I'm with Outfox. A few months before the end of my first year with them, MSE emailed me to suggest Outfox were offering an even better 12 month fixed deal for me to switch to, so without checking I asked to be moved. A day or two later MSE emailed me again to suggest there had been a glitch in their system and it had wrongly suggested I move to a more expensive tarriff.
It wasn't much more, so I left it on the new tarriff. Costs then went up dramatically so the net effect has been to save me quite a lot of money.
Outfox is one of the smaller ones, so I am anticipating them going bust with the rest - hence my wondering about the exact process.
No bad thing. They have the same owners as one of those firms making dubious claims of mega-efficiency for expensive electric storage heaters to unwitting pensioners.
These companies are going bust because they don't take upfront payments and electricity and gas prices are through the roof, because of the failure of renewable energy, which is delivering the square root of Sweet Fanny Adams right now, to prevent spot gas and electricity prices going through the roof.
Welcome to the REAL effect of ClimateChange (policy).
This is what happens when you let people who Cant Do Sums, but Can Do Feelings, ru[i]n your country.
I think Utility Point's earliest "tracker" tariffs allowed the customer various choices of how far to hedge future prices, can't remember the details now, so it shouldn't be a surprise to them ...
I think they started losing the plot when they offered boiler servicing and a rewards catalogue.
But boiler servicing etc. will not have cost them anything. They would just have been an agent selling a third party service insurance and taking the commission. They wouldn't have employed anyone themselves to service boilers.
The Natural Philosopher laid this down on his screen :
+1
I think this is a Northern Rock style problem. Sell long term, but buy short term. In NR's case lend a 25 year mortgage and borrow the funding for that on the monthly money market.
Which works fine until the price of the thing you're buying shoots up or dries up completely, and suddenly you haven't the money to cover the long term commitments you made.
I wonder how exposed companies are when their retail offer doesn't match what they're buying on the wholesale market. For example, it may be that Ofgem moaning 'too many tariffs, it's too complicated for consumers' prevents them offering tariffs that align with the futures contracts they can get on the spot market.
That's just affiliate marketing, I suspect. My water company is forever pushing supply pipe insurance, but it's actually from a third party. They just post the letters and pocket some cash.
Theo
Sounds like OFGEM should put potential suppliers through an "operational resilience" check like FCA (or whoever) does with banks? rather than letting any noddy and big ears operation take their chance and then need baling out to a supplier of last resort?
I'd started to look at prices a couple of months ago when my supplier shoved me off to another, but as the old tariff for electricity was being held till towards the end of October, and I'm not using much gas just yet, I've only just revisited and the price hikes look like a rip-off. Are the suppliers just preying on customer panic? Or is there a genuine expectation that gas prices are going to near double?
Not sure which way to jump now - and some suppliers seem to be only offering decent fixed deals if smart meters are installed, something I'm not keen on.
Given that OFGEM has given them the green light to bump their default tariffs by £139, I don't suppose many of them will immediately want to cut prices very far?
Andy Burns explained on 15/09/2021 :
So long as the customer doesn't loose money, there is no problem - it doesn't sound as if the customers are suffering any more than the inconvenience having to find a new supplier.
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