Utility Week

24 | MAY 2023 | UTILITY WEEK Customers Event Engaging customers now and in the future Utility Week's Customer Summit 2023 brought together senior figures from energy and water to discuss best practice in customer service and the support needed for vulnerable customers. Here are some of the key points raised. Ofgem: There's no reason PPM tariffs can't be competitive There is a "real opportunity" for prepayment meter (PPM) tariffs to be priced competi- tively, an Ofgem executive insisted. Jonathan Windeatt was speaking on day two of the conference, when he shared his view that despite controversy over forced installations, PPMs can be beneficial for some types of customers. "I'm very much of the view that for the right customer, with the right technology, the right products, prepayment can also be a fan- tastic way for people to manage their energy. Consistently across the years, for people who choose prepayment, you're getting 80-90% satisfaction rates," he pointed out. The senior manager for retail further explained how he believed PPM customers, who have historically faced higher costs to serve, could soon start to see cheaper tariffs. He said customers "should start to see a real opportunity to price prepayment com- petitively, if not lower" than other forms of payment "because the credit risks to the sup- plier should be negligible". He pointed to other ways of reducing the cost for PPM customers, citing modifications to the Uniform Network Code, concerning the allocation of unidentified gas that can- not be directly attributed to customers, for example, due to leakage or the‹ from the gas network. This gas is allocated to all custom- ers but in different proportions depending on their End User Category (EUC) band and metering class. For EUCs 1 and 2, there are separate bands for PPM and non-PPM cus- tomers for both domestic and non-domestic customers. The modification proposed by Centrica (UNC0838) would merge the weight- ing factors for PPM and non-PPM customers in the same EUC, metering class and sector. Windeatt also said smart prepayment pay as you go could potentially become "a real tariff of choice". He added: "But if you do that we've got to make sure the fundamentals of consumer protection are right, not just at the point of sale, but through the lifetime of the meter operating in that way." Load limiting Speaking earlier that day, EDF's managing director of customers Philippe Commaret said he believed PPMs had been "demon- ised" and that he thought that "a shame". He said EDF was looking at "load limit- ing" the amount of energy a PPM customer is supplied with as a way of stopping them from self-disconnecting in a bid to make the payment method more attractive. Commaret said: "We are investigating, for example, if we could leverage the smart meters that we use in order to test the same kind of solutions that we have implemented in France, which is to add a load-limiting type of approach for the electric meters so that the customers have access to a very tiny amount of energy, even if they haven't topped up their meter. "It's something which is pretty difficult to implement and which required us to change the mode of the meter. Unfortunately, I think the design of smart meters in the UK is not exactly fit for this type of solution, but we are still working on that." Windeatt, however, said there are con- cerns around load limiting. He explained there is a standard licence condition which states "where a meter has been configured in such a way as to

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