Tackling price concerns

Energy prices are never far from the headlines and continue to be a prime concern. We believe it's a key responsibility for us to tackle those concerns and offer our customers a range of products to suit their needs.

Changes in the wholesale energy price can impact the end price of energy in a variety of ways, and in February 2007 a downturn in the wholesale market brought a reduction in prices that we were able to pass on to our residential customers through a 5% decrease in electricity and a 16% decrease in gas.

After this decrease, we continued to refresh our propositions designed to protect our customers from volatility in the wholesale market. One such proposition was 'Price Protection', meaning that if electricity and gas prices went up, customers' prices wouldn't go beyond their capped rate. If our standard prices came down, their prices could too. Later on in the year we also launched our 'Fixed Price Until 2009' proposition, offering a fixed-price product to both electricity-only and to combined electricity and gas customers in the residential market.

We're also helping our prepayment customers manage their fuel costs more effectively, by rolling out key meters to replace token meters.Token meters have to be recalibrated manually after a rise in the price of electricity and a delay can lead to customers falling behind with their payments. However, this problem is eliminated with key meters, because they can be reset automatically.