Greedy power giants profit from misery

IT’S a figure that should shame any civilised country. Last year, as wholesale gas prices plummeted, the number of socalled excess winter deaths in Britain rose to a 15-year high of 43,900 – most caused by illnesses made worse by the cold.

Yet while the vulnerable died, or were forced to choose between heating and eating, profits at British Gas – which trades here as Scottish Gas – surged by 31 per cent to £547million.

Of course, we can only guess how much suffering would have been spared if the company had been quicker to pass on to consumers its savings in wholesale prices.

All we know is that while the cost of gas on world markets came down by some 34 per cent, BG cut its retail tariffs by only a miserly 14 per cent.

True, the firm is ready with excuses, claiming implausibly that wholesale prices account for only 40 per cent of its costs (though if that’s the case, there is surely huge scope for efficiency savings in its distribution and maintenance programmes).

But the Mail has a question: can anyone imagine the Big Six energy companies being as slow to increase consumers’ tariffs when world prices rise as they are to cut them when they fall?

Every year we have the farce of one company taking its turn to be first to up its prices. Then, as sure as night follows day, the others fall in to line, faces lugubrious, amid talk of ‘ bowing to commercial pressure’ and waxing lyrical about their ‘great reluctance’ to make customers pay more.

And now, after finding that households on standard variable rate tariffs have been overcharged by hundreds of millions of pounds, the Competition and Markets Authority is to publish measures aimed at improving competition.

With lives and civilised standards of comfort depending on it, they’d better be effective.