Decision Document on Revised Methodology for the Citizens Advice Star Rating

Decision Document on Revised Methodology for the Citizens Advice Star Rating [ 100 kb]

Citizens Advice provides free, independent, confidential and impartial advice to everyone on their rights and responsibilities. From 1 April 2014, Citizens Advice took on the powers of Consumer Futures to become the statutory representative for energy consumers across Great Britain. The Citizens Advice energy supplier rating serves as part of this statutory function.

First published in 2016, the star rating provides consumers with accessible information about energy supplier performance and enables consumers to make more informed switching decisions. Over the last two years, the UK’s energy retail market has experienced a period of significant disruption, with volatile wholesale prices leading to a wave of supplier failures and extensive policy responses from regulators and government. In addition, high energy prices have contributed to an escalating cost of living crisis.

Given these market conditions, Citizens Advice believed it was necessary to review how the star rating measures supplier performance on customer service. In March 2023 we released a consultation document about our proposed changes to the Star Rating, with a deadline for stakeholder responses in May 2023.

The key decisions we have made on updating to the star rating are:

● To remove the billing and switching metrics from the rating.
● To keep the weighting of the customer commitments at 10% and to keep the weighting of the complaints metric at 35%.
● To increase the weighting of the customer service metric to 55%.

The revised methodology as a result of the changes is available here [ 170 kb].