Leader: Fag packet sums do industry no favours

With the general election now firmly in view, the flurry of “statistics” is reaching fever pitch. Take this week’s report from Which?, where the consumer body claims to have “analysed movements in retail energy prices over the past two years in relation to commonly used hedging strategies”, and so come up with the figure of £2.9 billion that energy companies have apparently withheld from consumers over the past year. The science behind this number is anything but sound – presumably Which? has no better information on the energy companies’ hedging strategies, a closely guarded competitive secret, than the rest of us. Yet a few sums on the back of a fag packet generated a story that was on every radio show and in every newspaper on Tuesday morning; another hammer blow to the public perception of energy companies.