Administration costs at £60m for collapsed energy supplier Bulb

The cost of running the administration of collapsed energy supplier Bulb will land at around £60 million, MPs have been told.

Administrator Teneo said that its fees, those charged by its lawyers and by the company that it hired to find a new buyer for Bulb, will be around £10 million higher than had been the case up to the end of January when the National Audit Office reported.

“At the time with the NAO report, the costs for the special administrator, for the special administrator’s legal advisors, and for Lazard totalled £49.9m at the end of January,” Teneo’s Matt Cowlishaw told MPs on the Public Accounts Committee.

“In terms of thinking forward of what needs to be completed before the final exit of the special administration, we expect those costs to increase to around £60 million.”

Jeremy Pocklington, the permanent secretary at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, said that the fees were not unreasonable.

“We scrutinised their fees carefully... and they have an obligation to the court to ensure their fees are fair and reasonable, and the court has also put in place a process to scrutinise those,” he told MPs.

“So I don’t think we

think the fees here are somehow untoward.”

He added that the government had been granted a discount to the commercial rate.

This will be part of the overall cost of Bulb’s collapse, which is expected to heap a total of £246m on to either energy bills, or be paid by the government.

Bulb collapsed into administration in the autumn of 2021. It was one of many suppliers to fail in a tricky time when wholesale gas prices be were soaring.

The others were dealt with through other processes, but Bulb was just too big, with 1.6 million customers at the time of its collapse.

Experts worried that if another company had to take on all those customers, it could be destabilising and create a domino effect.

Matt Cowlishaw