Bernard Ingham: Powerful case for a fairer energy market

There is little doubt that the other five main suppliers will soon follow Scottish Power’s swingeing gas and electricity price increases of 19 and 10 per cent respectively.

Their justification will be higher wholesale prices – even though my old colleague, Ann Robinson, the former head of the energy consumer watchdog, has pointed out that they are not as high as in 2008. Yet retail prices are higher.

The logic of this situation is that energy is an imperfect market. There is no real competition. And whose fault is that? Why, the very body, Ofgem, which is supposed to regulate it. So far, it has been pretty useless. I have been complaining about it for years.

I once left its former arrogant chief executive, Calum McCarthy, fuming after he airily told me to shop around as I would in a supermarket – exactly the advice now given to us by Energy Secretary Chris Huhne.

I patiently explained to McCarthy, as I now do to Huhne, that I could examine and handle goods on offer in Tesco. But in the energy market, the multiplicity of tariffs meant that nobody had a clue what they were buying.

It is estimated that the big six suppliers offer around 300 tariffs – all with their fine print. That is not a market, it is organised confusion, the better to fleece you with.

Against this background, Ofgem, if it had any self-respect, would long ago have stopped the companies pestering us over the doorstop and on the phone to switch supplier.

It could be that at last Ofgem is going to bestir itself after Scottish Power’s nasty shock. It could refer the companies to the Competition Commission, though that tends, like Royal Commissions, to take minutes of meetings and spend years over references.

Alternatively – or in the meantime – it could, as it should have done years ago, require the companies to simplify their tariff structures. How about one peak and one off-peak tariff with the periods defined – all on one sheet of paper? We would then know who offers the best buy and who is inefficient. Until we get that sort of informed market, there will be no real competition and no downward pressure on prices.

But that is not the end of this tale of woe for pensioners as they struggle on their fixed incomes against rising inflation and next to no interest on their bank accounts.

The coalition, like Labour before it, is walloping them, too. These spineless, trendy politicians dance to the tune of environmental fanatics bent on saving the world from carbon dioxide, indispensable though it is to plant life, as if Britain, emitting only two per cent of the world’s CO2, could make the slightest difference to the climate.

The result is a plethora of “green” levies – the Renewables Obligation, that scam called the European Emissions Trading Scheme, the Carbon Emissions Reduction Commitment and Feed-In Tariffs.

And this is not to mention the Climate Change Levy that hammers energy-intensive industry, and the Carbon Floor Price, which is to come in 2013.

Worse still, the utterly besotted Huhne, backed by the Prime Minister, has just twisted the price screw by making Britain the first country to be legally required to cut carbon emissions by 50 per cent (on 1990) by 2027.

Nobody has any precise idea how much this mostly useless and grossly expensive nonsense costs us. It is estimated to load anything from £84 to £200 on to the average annual bill. The only certainty is that it will rise and rise.

It is outrageous that Ministers never told the consumer, as distinct from the taxpayer, he would have to pay for this political correctness. It is unforgivable that there are no official, authoritative figures for precisely what each measure costs. And it is a grievous dereliction of duty that the coalition allows the con to continue.

Just as the companies should be ordered drastically to simplify their tariffs, so the Government should redeem itself by requiring them to print on our bills the itemised cost of each of its very own “green” measures.

We should be told how much we are paying to allow it to describe itself as “the greenest government ever”.

The coalition talks a lot about transparency. Well, it can start practising what it preaches today on the Pensioners’ Parliament.

We would all benefit from being wiser.