00:00Energy bills are putting the pinch on bills for households across the country.
00:04The energy price cap is due to rise, but how will this affect you?
00:08I spoke to an expert on the topic to find out.
00:10So the energy price cap is basically a set of rules that is imposed by the energy regulator Ofgem
00:17that governs the amount that energy suppliers can charge for a unit of energy.
00:22So that impacts the bills of roughly two-thirds of households
00:27who are on tariffs that are governed by the energy price cap.
00:32The energy price cap has gone up.
00:34It will be rising for all of those households from the 1st of October,
00:38and it's going up by about 2%.
00:40So a typical household will see their bills increase, unfortunately,
00:44just at the time that we are going into those colder winter months,
00:48we're turning the heating on, we are using more energy.
00:51So most of us are on tariffs at the moment that are governed by the Ofgem price cap.
00:57About a third of households are on fixed tariffs.
01:00It's a great time to review whether your direct debit is correct.
01:04Lots of us are paying slightly the wrong amount.
01:06Some of us are paying too much and are building up a significant amount of credit.
01:10Your energy supplier might not always tell you if that's the case,
01:13because they quite like having that little bank of credit in your account.
01:16Some of us, our bills are set too low, and we are building up,
01:19some of us are building up a pretty significant amount of energy debt,
01:23which it is really important to get on top of.
01:25Ofgem say that the price cap is designed to protect consumers
01:28and to stop unfair profiteering.
01:30Do you really think that it's working as intended in that respect?
01:33I think that it protects consumers to a certain extent,
01:36but it's absolutely not a perfect measure.
01:39So the price cap was brought in under really different circumstances
01:43before the energy crisis, which we all remember,
01:46our energy bills really significantly shot up.
01:49Lots of companies went bust at that time.
01:51Since then, there are far fewer energy suppliers,
01:55which means that there's very little competition in the market.
01:58Do you think that there's anything that government
01:59and local authorities can or should be doing?
02:02What I think the government and the regulator of Ofgem should be looking at
02:06is really trying to increase competition in the energy market.
02:09At the moment, we have a really small number of energy companies
02:12who are not having to do that much to compete.
02:15Because of that lack of competition in the market,
02:17it's not worth it for a lot of us to switch.
02:20And it hasn't been for a long time.
02:21So most of us are kind of sitting as we were.
02:24You know, we're sticking with the same old energy companies
02:27and that's exactly what they want.
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