Energy firms to come clean about cheaper rivals

ENERGY suppliers could be forced to write to customers to let them know about rivals’ cheaper deals.

Under plans, customers who have been stuck on an expensive standard variable tariff for at least one year will receive a letter from their supplier alerting them to better offers.

Energy regulator Ofgem said a trial is already under way involving two suppliers. It faced a backlash against its original proposal to create a national customer database that would let rival firms write to customers with better deals, raising fears they’d be deluged with junk mail.

Under the new scheme, people would receive just one letter from their own supplier or Ofgem. The regulator is also trialling its own online switching service. Customers who have been on the same standard variable tariff for several years will be sent a letter from their supplier encouraging them to use Ofgem’s online deal-checker.

Ofgem is also abandoning plans to force price comparison sites to show every deal on the market. Instead, they only need to show deals on their main webpage that customers can actually switch to directly through their website.

Ofgem says this is because customers were being deterred from switching if they could see cheap deals on these sites that they could not then move to with the click of a button.