| Comment | Problem is it's targeting the wrong people - the energy retailers are not profiting here, in fact more than 30 of them have gone bust because they were losing money before the price cap went up. Even now many of them are refusing to take on new customers because wholesale costs are higher than retail, and they're losing money on retail.
The ones profiting are the UK oil and gas companies whose extraction costs have not increased, but whose revenues have, because we are integrated into the European market and paying continental european prices for UK extracted fossil fuels.
The obvious solution to this is a windfall tax on those companies (BP, Shell etc), which the tories have steadfastly refused to do, not surprisingly because they all have fingers in that pie.
(to a lesser extent *some* renewable operators are also making hay out of high wholesale electricity prices so should also be windfall taxed - so here SSE/ScottishPower should be targeted)
Ofgem can't do much unless government instructs them, because it's not a failure of regulation - the market is working as intended, gas costs are just extremely high due to Ukraine (and some other confounding issues). |
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