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The government has accused energy retailers of lying about when they stopped the forced installation of prepayment meters (PPM).
Following the major allegations made against British Gas earlier this month, all retailers voluntarily halted their PPM warrant activity until the end of winter.
In a recent interview with Utility Week Energy UK chief executive Emma Pinchbeck accused the new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero head Grant Shapps of producing “inaccurate” PR around the action taken by suppliers.
In particular she accused Shapps of wrongly taking credit for the pause in forced PPM installations.
She said: “Before he’d written to them [suppliers], they’d already come out and [stopped forced PPM installations]. And I know that because we’re the trade body so we’ve been involved in those discussions about how the industry was going to respond. And they’d all announced their moratoria a week before his press release in public.”
Yet a government spokesperson has since strongly refuted the comments, claiming: “It is categorically untrue that more than a handful of suppliers had halted forced prepayment meter installations prior to the energy security secretary’s intervention”.
The spokesperson added: “Government routinely engages with the energy industry, including Energy UK, but these statements ignore the impact Putin’s weaponisation of energy has had on world markets. We are doing all we can to support people and businesses and the government has stepped in to pay around half of households’ energy bills this winter.”
The government did issue a press release on 22 January in which Shapps called on suppliers to voluntarily stop the practice of forced prepayment switching, but the letter attached to the release which was sent to retailers the day before does not include this demand.
It was not until after the investigation by The Times was published on 1 February that suppliers began to halt their PPM warrant activity, with Ofgem chief Jonathan Brearley also writing to retailers asking them to do so on 10 February.
Prior to Ofgem’s intervention, several major energy suppliers had proactively paused their warrant activity including EDF, Scottish Power and Eon. Octopus also confirmed it was not installing any of the devices.
Ovo Energy meanwhile suspended its warrant activity last November.
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