What a difference a day makes

Britain’s largest energy supplier, British Gas, has finally felt the need to put prices up for online customers – three weeks after hitting the majority of its customers with a 15% price increase. The supplier had protected its online Click Energy 4 customers from its price hike on 18th January. They saw their annual bills stay steady at £742 – the price it has been since October last year - while the majority of British Gas customers saw their bills shoot up to over £1,000.

Tim Wolfenden, Head of Home Services at uSwitch.com, comments: “Today’s announcement has come as a bolt from the blue – only today British Gas was saying: ‘we are still the cheapest for dual fuel.’

“When British Gas raised its prices for standard customers it said that it had been forced to because of higher wholesale prices in the last six months of 2007. However, many eyebrows were raised by the significant price gap it brought in between online and standard customers – standard customers were paying up to £313 more, which many believed was discriminatory and difficult to justify. Clearly the pressure has now told – not just from the point of view of maintaining an unsustainably low price, but also from the public scrutiny that this two tier price system had started to attract.

“Now that all British Gas customers have seen price rises, it is time for them to start looking around to see whether they can get a better deal elsewhere. There are still good online deals out there. But for those British Gas customers who bought into the ‘we are cheapest’ message and are now feeling somewhat disillusioned, there are competitive capped and fixed price deals which will protect households from price rises at least for a while.”