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The Big Deal website has today accused the UK’s five biggest comparison sites of being unlawful by keeping the best energy deals from customers.
The company, which also helps customers find the cheapest deals online, put forward their complaints in a letter to uSwitch, Compare the Market, MoneySuperMarket, Go Compare and Confused and copied the letter to government, the Competition and Markets Authority and the EU Competition Commission, asking them to take action to protect consumers.
“This research shows that these sites are hiding from customers the cheapest deals. If they don’t get paid by an energy company for a deal then they will hide it from people even if it’s the best deal in the country,” said the Big Deal.
“We believe this research raises major concerns about the activity of these sites and whether they are behaving dishonestly and unethically,” it added.
The Big Deal claims that when rival price comparison companies prompt customers to say they wish to switch “today”, then all the deals that do not earn the site commission are filtered out.
Only if a consumer clicks “no” for this option are they shown other deals, which can be cheaper.
The Big Deal adds that some websites have a default “yes” for this question, which makes it even harder for consumers to see the best deal. It claims over almost a third of energy deals get hidden in this way overall.
“These sites claim to be fair and impartial. Over a 13 week period we analysed the results given by price comparison websites when identical user information is inputted. We found all the major price comparison websites hid the cheapest deal from customers. Many for weeks on end,” the letter from the Big Deal’s co-founders said.
“We believe that this behaviour is a clear breach of EU and English law,” the letter added.
In response, a statement from Ofgem said: “We are currently revising the Ofgem confidence code to push price comparison sites to higher standards of reliable information by making the whole of market comparison easier to see. And we’re proposing tougher new rules to the code to make commission arrangements clearer. ”
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