Let's play devils advocate just for a second.
There's no money in energy supply. It's pretty much a loss making business for any of the suppliers. Therefore, why should they add customer bad debt to an already disastrous sector. It's not the suppliers fault that the wholesale market has ballooned up and increased the overall cost of energy.
You seem to be making a case for Supply to be nationalised.
I think my main point, and I've said this elsewhere is that the suppliers are being hit, wrongly, with a big stick. If they had been printing cash in the past I can understand this, but it's not the case. The profit is between the production and the wholesale market and not between the wholesale market and the consumer.
I started work in the sector just after the introduction of competition and I genuinely believe that the consumer received massive benefits from the ability to shop around and the efficiency savings forced on the energy businesses. The problem became, and this is a Government strategy issue, that we were over-supplied with energy so prices were on a downward spiral. This meant no-one invested in new production. So, 20 years later, there's a supply shock and the market fails.
Several new businesses entered the sector a few years ago, I'm thinking Robin Hood Energy and Bristol Energy, on an assumption that big players were making huge margins in domestic supply. The reality dawned pretty quickly and they both dumped a tonne of taxpayers cash.
I'm divided on nationalisation of energy. I've never been a fan of the regulator but, also, this Government ran Bulb for nearly a year and made a royal clusterfuck of it. They just continued doing all the wrong things but in bigger size. That and I'm still a good few years from retirement and I need to pay for the teenagers education.