Citizens Advice response to Ofgem’s consultation on its draft Consumer Vulnerability Strategy 2025
We are pleased to respond to the consultation on Ofgem’s updated draft Consumer Vulnerability Strategy 2025.
We have previously stated what we would like to see included in this strategy update in our letter response to Ofgem’s open letter from last year. In this response we’ve identified five key challenges that Ofgem, the government and the energy sector need to tackle in the coming years, in order to better support consumers in vulnerable situations:
Bringing help closer to consumers who need it
Radically improving the prepay experience
Providing universal protection and a seamless customer journey
Creating an inclusive market
Preventing vulnerability in future markets
These five themes are similar to those that Ofgem have identified in their draft strategy update.
In our letter we also outlined our previous work on vulnerability since the publication of the last vulnerability strategy in 2013. We have detailed our upcoming research reports which will be published over the summer and the rest of this year. For this consultation response, we have used evidence from contacts to our general consumer service, cases from our local citizens advice and case studies from our specialist advice service, the Extra Help Unit. We have also used evidence from our policy research work.