Jayne Dowle: To switch or not to switch... Great bill dilemma that brings on the shivers

I know the idea is to save myself money. Being self-employed though, every hour I spend on the challenge costs me in lost earnings. I should also be surfing the comparison sites, to find out if some small renewable energy company off Orkney could give me a better deal. Somehow I can’t justify the time for that either. I really have got many things much more worthwhile to occupy myself with.

All I want is a simple, fair bill with no catches. Yet, if I don’t want to be ripped off, the onus is on me to sort it. Not the energy companies. Not the Government. In fact, the Prime Minister himself reminded me of my obligations a month or so ago. With the breathless excitement of Newton discovering gravity, he told the nation something that most of us have known for years.

If you’re prepared to spend the best part of three days hunting down statements, downloading data, speaking very slowly to people in call centres in far-off lands and then fuming when a direct debit for £350 goes out of your bank account in error, go for it.

Oh sorry. Isn’t that what he meant? “I’d encourage customers who are not happy with the service they’re getting and not happy with the prices to go to the switching sites online and see whether they can get a better deal,” said the Prime Minister.

He made it sound so easy. Yet those of us who have tried it for ourselves know the truth. And please don’t get me started on the Green Deal, that whizz-bang Government wheeze which obliges us to get into even more personal debt to upgrade our insulation. Money saving? We’d freeze to death before we saw a return.

I’m not a lazy consumer. I’ll stand up for my rights and fight my corner against anyone. Dealing with my gas bill though? It makes me resentful. Why should it all be down to me? We consumers are literally powerless, caught 
up in the middle of the 
energy companies and the Government.

When British Gas pushed average annual dual fuel bills up by £120 to £1,471 this year – the highest typical tariff ever seen in the UK – it blamed Government costs.

When energy bosses were hauled before MPs the other week in a grand showdown over record rises, what happened?

Not much, except for mutterings of an inquiry into competitive industry pricing.

Another inquiry? What’s the point of that? Everything that is ever suggested about curbing crippling increases comes to nothing.

Meanwhile, I am shivering in my own home, crouched over my laptop in my coat and hat, because it’s too expensive to put the heating on during the day.

But why should I spend my valuable time tracking down a deal that will still leave me poor when the energy companies can’t even do their own sums? The price of wholesale gas has risen just 1.7 per cent, but the average consumer gas bill has gone up 10 per cent this autumn.

Now, I was pretty rubbish at maths at school, but how can that be right? It’s so out of kilter, it’s like living in Alice in Wonderland. Only not so funny. Especially when you learn that Age 
UK predicts up to 24,000 
people will die this winter 
because they can’t afford proper heating. Not only from hypothermia, but from heart attacks and strokes brought on by the cold.

And here’s the really chilling thing. I moan about having to spend time messing about on “switching sites”, but actually I’m one of the lucky ones.

At least I’ve got a laptop and reliable broadband internet. I’ve got the keyboard skills and telephone voice and the concentration to wade through all the confusing information. What if I didn’t though? What if I was an elderly person living alone with no access to such benefits? Or a young person in rented accommodation being hammered by the extortionate cost of a prepayment meter?

If people like me think they are powerless, what hope for those without even the basic resources to take matters into their own hands?

Anyway, back to the big question occupying most of my waking hours – should I sign a fixed-rate deal for three years or not? I think we all know the answer to that one, without a crystal ball. There’s only one way that energy bills are going, and that’s up. And it’s clear to me sitting here shivering at the keyboard with my calculator that neither the Government nor the energy companies are prepared to do anything whatsoever about that. They will just carry on squabbling and fiddling while our money burns.