Soames in attack on ‘pressure group’ Ofgem

By Terry Murden
Published on Friday 25 November 2011 00:00

AGGREKO boss Rupert Soames last night urged the UK government to tell Ofgem to “start behaving like a regulator and not like a pressure group”.

He said that if Britain is to attract billions of pounds for vital infrastructure the regulator needed to strike a “fair balance” between the consumer’s short-term interests to have cheap electricity and long-term interests of keeping the lights on. In a speech in Aberdeen, Soames said Ofgem “seem to regard their role as to out-which Which? magazine and to use politics and spin as their preferred tactics”.

Soames questioned Ofgem chief executive Alistair Buchanan’s reference to giving the energy companies a “left hook, then a right hook, and now we are going to give them a beating”. He said the regulator’s claim that the Big Six were making £125 profit per consumer per year, up from £15 a year earlier, was a “highly dubious statistic”. He said it “traduced the reputations of the energy suppliers”.

He said that “everybody knows” electricity bills have gone up because the cost of oil and gas has increased, the cost of subsidies to renewable energy are beginning to flow through “and, yes, at the margin, suppliers are probably playing fast and loose with tariffs. It is the task of the regulator to steer a rational course between these forces”.

The power generator boss said investors were not “crowding forward with wallets open” because the UK energy sector “carries the burden of being sniped at and spun against” by Ofgem.

An Ofgem spokesman said its remit was to protect the interest of the consumer, make the market more transparent and ensure there was an appropriate level of investment in the industry.

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