MickiQ
In My Defence I was left Unsupervised
The FB is a public service that is publicly funded by taxation in order to provide a service to the public what has it got to do with British Gas which is a commercial corporation that (no matter how people may kid themselves) exists to generate profit for its shareholders so any comparison between them is just whataboutery.I bet you’d love to pay for your internet by the megabyte, perhaps you should campaign for an end to inclusive phone minutes too. Maybe go the whole hog and lobby to charge people for actually calling the fire brigade rather than slap that unfair levy on everyone’s council tax bill?
There’s plenty of documentation out there on the transmission grid and distribution network operator costs and how these relate to the standing charges in different regions.
Internet and mobile phone charges are an interesting discussion but we will return to that later.
Firstly let us take a look at standing charges using the one example where I have all the data ie myself. I am a customer of British Gas whose standing charges (daily) are 44.75p for Electric and 27.22p for Gas so they respectively charge me £13.43 a month and £8.12 a month standing charge. I pay £115 a month for electric minus the standing charge means I buy (at 27.63p kwh) 367kwh of electric pm. For gas I pay £95 minus the standing charge gives me (at 7.28p kwh) 1193 kwh of gas.
Averaging the standing charge across the amount of actual energy brings the actual cost to 31.29p kwh electric and 7.96p for Gas.
That's me so let's take a look at someone who uses half the energy I do, they would pay £50.70 for their actual electric and £43.39 for their actual gas BUT they're paying the same standing charge so their final bill will come to £64.13 electric and £51.51 gas. They're using 50% of the energy I do but paying 55% of the cost at an averaged cost of 34.95p and 8.64p. If they were buying their energy at the same actual rate as me they would pay £57.26 and £47.44.
And this gets worse the less energy someone uses since the standing charge gets averaged over fewer units and the more expensive per unit it gets. The more energy someone uses then the cheaper it gets per unit.
Standing charges are fundamentally unfair, OK I know this is not a fashionable idea these days but it doesn't strike me as great business sense either. Simply lumping the cost of maintaining the infrastructure in with the general price and
selecting a break even price point at which units are charged (Hell use me I'm probably about the average anyway) is a far better idea.
Saying you can find documentation as to how the standing charges is spent is meaningless so what? it doesn't justify it. I'm sure my daughter's driving instructor would give me a breakdown of how much is spent on fuel, insurance etc if I asked him.
However the entire billing process consists of "Dad Transfer me £31 please". Supermarkets don't break down the bill and charge separately for infrastructure, Rail companies don't, Airlines don't so why do utility companies?
Which brings us to internet and mobile phone companies. Vodaphone charge me £9 a month for unlimited texts, unlimited calls and 1Gb of data, Virgin Media charge me £44 per month for all I can use internet (and believe me I can burn through terabytes) so I am effectively in both cases paying only for infrastructure but getting services for free (and yet both companies seem to be making a profit). I think this is a great business model.
Electric and Gas Standing Charges buy NOTHING. you have people sat there paying £20+ a month to sit in the fucking dark and cold afraid to turn the light or heating on because it will mean they can't eat if they do. If we have to have standing charges why isn't there a certain amount of energy included with folks being charged extra only if they go over it?