To mark the arrival of Alistair Phillips-Davies as the new Chief Executive of SSE, we invited a number of organisations and individuals to ask a question they’d like him to answer.
This week, we’ll be featuring Alistair’s answers to those questions, on subjects ranging from what we are doing to tackle fuel poverty, the future of renewables and energy policy through to business threats and opportunities and the challenge of building customer trust.
We kick off today with questions relating to what we are doing to tackle fuel poverty and how we support vulnerable customers.
Jenny Saunders, Chief Executive of National Energy Action:
How do you plan to help your customers who are living in fuel poverty?
Norman Kerr, Director, Energy Action Scotland:
What importance will SSE place, going forward, on tackling fuel poverty and supporting vulnerable consumers and how will this be done?”
Alistair:
Energy is a significant purchase and the fact is that some people struggle with their bills. We have to make sure that we target the help we offer to the people most in need.
As you know the Warm Homes Discount is one of the main ways we provide support. Qualifying vulnerable customers will get rebates of £135 this year. Last year we spent around £50m on helping 370,000 customers through this scheme.
We really value the work we do with you guys also. It helps us identify those most in need of help. We work with a number of other organisations too on small, but really impactful, projects. For example our partnership with Social Enterprise Direct makes sure people are getting advice on what benefits and tax credits they can get. We managed to help 263 customers claim around £700K of extra money last year and we hope to help even more this year.
We also offer other help. We have actually been calling up customers to give them energy efficiency and tariff advice. We call these Annual Energy Reviews and they are all about saving customers money, in practical ways.
As a country we have to make our houses more efficient, something I know you two dedicate your careers to. We support the Government’s efforts to do this through schemes like the Energy Companies Obligation (ECO), but these schemes can be pretty tricky to actually deliver, which makes them more expensive than they should be. We have to work on ways with your organisations and others to help get these schemes right.
We must continue to look for new ways to help identify people effectively and find ways of getting them the help they need. I always like the concept of a Fuel Poverty Agency to help in this area. Having one trusted body as the gateway for fuel poverty assistance programmes would surely make things easier for customers. Particularly, if it then used Government social security data to locate those most in need. This would really help get assistance to the right places, at minimum cost.
We are lobbying for this to be introduced, so please support us. In the meantime, we will keep doing the simple things that really help like insulating homes, delivering rebates and working with customers to manage their energy and their budgets. However our door is always open for any ideas you have that help find and, most importantly, help vulnerable customers with their bills.