For those in energy, or keen readers of the Telegraph you may have seen headlines about Good Energy topping the chart with the most non-compliance issues in Ofgem’s Supplier Performance Report (SPR). This contains non-compliance issues with the social and environmental schemes Ofgem runs: Energy Company Obligation (ECO), Warm Home Discount (WHD), Renewables Obligation (RO) & Feed-in-Tariffs (FiT).
Good scored 48, E.ON 41 & Scottish Power 39. All the Big 6 were in the top 9 worst performers.
Now, not reading the full article or taking it without context you’d think: Good Energy claim to be green but it is clearly just a claim, and there’s the Big 6 being bad again: nothing changes.
However, these numbers are absolute, so doesn’t take into account the fact that the Big 6, Good Energy & Ecotricity (also in top 9) are the largest FiT suppliers (FiT non-compliance is over 75% of the SPR issues) and so you’d expect them to have the most issues. Using a back of envelope weighting for the FiT scores, and using the deemed export payments (which has errors around assuming every FiT installation in the same size) to refactor the number of FiT issues would mean that on a rough score the Big 6, Good & Ecotricity would score between 2 & 5. Against that ratio, OVO scores 38, Bulb 104 and Outfox the Market a shocking 1748.
Also, as Good themselves say in their response, the SPR does not promote good behaviour or data quality – fixing issues and updating them can lead to SPR failures. Much like complaints stats, suppliers who report & signpost properly can appear worse then their peers when they’re performing better. Appropriate weighting should be used on these, to better reflect size and not let the anti-green brigade have a potential headline to go after.
It is also important to ensure that when reporting on these stats, as Utility Week and the Telegraph both have, that the full story is provided. The Telegraph also implied that Good Energy has issues around RO compliance, which the above chart clearly shows not to be the case. Either Outfox the Market should have been the story or perhaps Ofgem putting out figures with potential to be misinterpreted. Well, not potential – they clearly have been. Bad Ofgem.
