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utILIty WeeK | 21st - 27th February 2014 | 11 Interview O utspoken and controversial, leading green Tory Tim Yeo has made waves as the chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee (ECCC). He garnered massive national publicity last year from hauling the big six bosses in front of the committee, and this year turned his guns on the distribution networks. But Yeo has problems of his own, having survived a row about lobbying rules last year only to be deselected by his local Conservative Association earlier this month. The deselection was a blow to Yeo. He will step down from frontline politics in 2015, having served his con- stituency since 1983, including a stint as environment minister in John Major's government between 1992 and 1993. But he has 15 months until then and, as he defends his record, his determination to call utilities to account seems undiminished. Today, he tells Utility Week, it's time for distribution network operators (DNOs) to sharpen up their act, Ofgem to get tough, and the big six to be broken up. Top of the agenda is the performance of the DNOs, especially as the UK recovers from the latest of the many winter storms. A one-off session following the St Jude storm last year highlighted their shortcomings, accord- ing to Yeo, and the committee is preparing to launch a full scale investigation. "Frankly I thought they were not very good," he says. He raises concerns about the quality of network companies' communications with the public – "nobody knows who they are" – and the fact that in the face of widespread storm damage and flooding, their emer- gency planning was not up to the task. "Maintaining the power supply now is almost like an emergency service. You expect the ambulance service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And I think keeping people's electricity supply is as important," he says. What's gone wrong? Yeo condemns not just the DNOs, but also the hapless regulator, Ofgem, for not being "anything like tough enough on these people". As the committee starts receiving evidence before its inquiry, the chair is convinced more can be done in transmission and distribution to help brings costs down. "Most of us now know some of the components of a bill and the green levies have been the focus of a lot of attention recently," Yeo says. "But these guys account for more than the green levies and they don't seem to get the same scrutiny. "I think the prime minister – I've talked to him about it – I think he's taking on board that we've got some monopolies here and maybe we need to bear down on their costs a bit heavily." Yeo's view seems prescient this week, following Ofgem's announcement that net- works' allowed cost of capital will be scaled back to 3.8 per cent. As for the regulator, Yeo has high hopes for the incoming chief executive, Dermot Nolan. He expects him to have a "fresh look" at the sector and to "demonstrate a greater effectiveness than it has done in the past two or three years". "I think there's been a sense that Ofgem could have been tougher for some time and has only really woken up to public concern on energy prices in the past couple of years, so the companies have been getting away with a certain amount." This brings the conversation to the big debate: the public perception of the energy sector and the energy companies. Yeo says that Ofgem can, and should, do more to increase transparency by forcing suppliers to publish their activities in the wholesale market "so you can see whether this business of up like a rocket and down like a feather is actually true". However, Yeo says this may not go far enough to reassure consumers, and believes the ultimate solution to reassure the public is to break up the vertically inte- grated companies. "I think the level of distrust of energy companies among the public is now so great that the only way you'll rebuild that trust is if you end that verti- cal integration.