Leader: It’s all change at British Gas – except for prices

It’s been an interesting few weeks at Centrica/British Gas. The company, long the sleeping giant of the energy market, has been fairly quiet since chief executive Iain Conn announced a £1 billion strategy shift towards retail last summer. Presumably, grand vision announced, it’s been getting its operations in order so that it can deliver – but jam tomorrow means little to the stock market, and the company’s share price has suffered accordingly (news, p23).

That said, there have been some interesting developments. First, the announcement of a restructure at British Gas, with three business units streamlined into two; hotshot Sarwjit Sambhi given the top job at the all-important home division; and an audacious raid on BG Group and BP for the new heads of E&P and technology and engineering respectively. With the company tight-lipped on the future of former senior staff at the three divisions, and what the restructure means for those 6,000 looming job losses, what wasn’t said was perhaps more interesting than what was.

Since then, the company has announced the sale of three windfarms. It has also set out an initial 500 jobs to go – 90 of them at British Gas Business and the rest in its loft and cavity wall insulation business, which is being closed. On a smaller but perhaps significant scale, it has announced the handout of 20,000 free new boilers.

All these moves are in line with the strategy Conn set out, as the company moves away from generation and focuses on building a market-leading retail business that capitalises on its unrivalled ­British Gas brand to become the public’s energy partner of choice.

Funny, then, that the company was one of just two members of the big six still holding out on price cuts as Utility Week went to press. Sure, the supplier was the only one to cut its gas prices last year, but public and political memories are short and with the Competition and Markets Authority’s provisional remedies set to be laid out next month, the more competitive the market can prove itself, the better its chances of escaping radical intervention.

Chances are, Centrica has a few more cards up its sleeve. We’ll find out next week, when it reports its 2015 results and looks to the year ahead.

• Do energy companies “suffer enough” for consistently poor ­customer satisfaction results? Ofgem partner Rob Salter-Church doesn’t think so. You can see his comments, and the companies’ own views on their performance, in Utility Week’s exclusive video report. Visit: bit.ly/1V0p4Sm.