Decision on changes to the energy supplier rating

17 Tachwedd 2017

Citizens Advice first published the energy supplier rating in 2016. It allows consumers to make informed switching decisions and provides accessible information about energy supplier performance. It is published on our website and integrated into the results page of our price comparison website.

Earlier this year we began a review of the rating design. We used workshops with suppliers and other interested stakeholders to identify ways that we could improve the rating, including increasing the number of suppliers in the rating, and changing the data used to score some areas of performance.

We then published a consultation on our detailed proposals for changes. We issued a request for information (RFI) to all suppliers with more than 50,000 customer accounts, to gather the data we would need for these proposed changes. This allowed us to assess how viable our proposed metrics were, by understanding the range of performance levels and robustness of the data. We have now made some decisions on the next steps for the project, based on the the responses to this consultation and the data from the RFI. Responses to the consultation have been published alongside this decision (available here) [ 10 mb].

The key decisions we have made are:

to reduce the threshold for automatic inclusion to 50,000 customer accounts and introduce a route for voluntary inclusion for smaller suppliers
to score billing performance according to both bill accuracy and timeliness of bills and annual statements
to score customer service according to telephone waiting times, and keep alternative contact methods under review
to retain the current methodology for complaints data
to allow white labels to be scored separately to their parent supplier for some metrics, on a case-by-case basis

We are also proposing three new changes to the rating, based on consultation responses:

to include further voluntary industry schemes, and adjust the weighting to accommodate this change
to include information on fuel mix in the rating tool on our website (but not score it in the rating itself)
to adjust the way that the switching metric is calculated

We are now seeking feedback on these new proposals by 30th November 2017. This should be sent to alexander.belsham-harris@citizensadvice.org.uk.