When chef and restaurant owner Michael Clay was told he would have to pay £32,000 to exit an energy contract he signed up for last December, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Michael owns the small pizzeria Dokes in Prestwich.
Pozitive Energy now offers a tariff at 29p. He asked them to be reasonable, and let him cancel his 70p contract, and join its new 29p tariff instead, and said he was happy to pay a penalty charge to do so if necessary. “With the government cap, we were already paying three times more than we were paying before. We’ve barely been able to keep up with that, and come Saturday, we’ll be paying five times more than when we opened. It’s over 10% of our turnover. That’s unsustainable. It’s crazy.
“If we don’t manage to sort something… it’s simple maths now for us, if you go a few months down the line and we’ve had £6500 bills for electricity every month. It’s gone from two to three percent of our turnover to something like 12%.” “Ofgem are a body set up to protect the consumer. They have been repeatedly warned both what was happening and also the cliff edge that is coming this Friday, on their watch. To say they have been useless would be an understatement.
In a statement to the M.E.N, Ofgem said: “Ofgem is committed to working with consumer groups, energy suppliers and Government to ensure all consumers, both domestic and non-domestic, are protected.