Businesses unaware of move to half-hourly charging

A survey by Npower has revealed that 81 percent of British retailers are unaware of the change to half-hourly charging which will affect them from November.

It also showed that 67 percent were unaware that it might have cost implications for them, with businesses moving to half-hourly charging due to see their bills on average increase by £230 per year.

Npower Business Solutions director of markets and innovation Wayne Mitchell said suppliers are doing what’s “right and appropriate” to inform customers about the move.

He said the change is “fundamentally for suppliers to communicate to end users” and argued that much more communication is going on than is normally the case for a Balancing and Settlement Code change.

However Mitchell said it is a “mixed bag” whether businesses in line to be the first to change to half-hourly metering in November already know about it.

Mitchell blames the speed of the decision, made by Ofgem at the end of last month, to delay the implementation by a year until April 2017 for creating the awareness issues.

Despite the quick decision to delay change to half-hourly readings, Mitchell said the long process before this to come up with the practicalities of how the changeover will work has also hampered the communication effort.

He said if this had been finalised faster “consumers could have been communicated with more quickly and decisively about what’s going to happen. Suppliers will need time to adapt their infrastructure to ensure that the reclassification process can run smoothly and according to schedule.”

Mitchell said the technical nature of the change could be a major barrier to customer understanding and awareness, and is part of the reason Npower will not be communicating with its customers directly until around four months before customer’s contract renewal date.

He said: “What we found is if you communicate too early the message gets lost because it is too far in advance, customers aren’t ready to come to the market,” but acknowledged that this would mean businesses would be unaware they have the option to receive the benefits for half-hourly charging by breaking their contracts early.

British Independent Retailers Association’s professional services and special projects director Robert Jarrett said: “Retailers are already under pressure to make ends meet, so it will be essential for them to react in the right way. Whilst we can understand the logic behind the changes being proposed we do wonder if Ofgem has given sufficient consideration to the impact on businesses and to maximising the awareness of this change.”