No Standing Charge Energy Providers

General Chat
1

So not really a question for the Monzo community, I appreciate, but over the years everyones been a fairly vocal bunch about saving on energy costs.

I’m just about to buy a house that I’m not going to be living in for at least 6 months and of course want to cut costs wherever possible.

I was using MSE’s Energy Club because they have a filter which shows the zero standing charge providers - but seemingly none of them exist anymore? I couldn’t find any. The energy usage is going to be very minimal so a slightly higher cost for that but no standing would suit perfectly.

2

You can thank Ofgem for that I’m afraid, they abolished the No Standing Charge tariffs quite some time ago that a lot of Energy Providers offered, as they felt customers we being confused too much about what they were actually paying. So they decreed all suppliers had to remove these tariffs and offer only tariffs with a Standing Charge.

They wanted to have simplified tariffs between suppliers so customers could see what the actual difference was when choosing a new supplier, what this resulted in for many customers was that there ended up being very little difference between suppliers and their prices.

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3

Standing charges for both Leccy & Gas is now applied to all available tariffs for properties with a Gas and/or Electric supply.

To get rid of a SC you have to have the supply terminated. Properly. Like Arnold would.

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4

I feel like scrapping the standing charges would have made more sense and made it simpler to understand instead of two separate fees to compare…

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5

There is at least one provider who still offers a zero standing charge tariff.

I just found the following:

IMG_20210725_002050
IMG_20210725_0020501080×1930 271 KB

(Never used the provider - have no idea what they are like)

Your error is using the MSE Energy Club. They don’t show all the available tariffs or list all energy suppliers.

You would be better off using Citizens Advice whose search engine is more comprehensive and they are not trying to sell your anything

6

Agreed. I never knew that they had banned this. We have a really high standing charge and unfortunately we can’t change providers so just stuck with it. Even if we sat in the dark we’d be paying a fortune (relatively).

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7

I just had a look at that one you mentioned and it seems like it also has a standing charge in the unit rate per quarter. Plus it’s really expensive.

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8

It doesn’t have a standing charge - so there is no cost of you don’t use it - but yes, the first units per quarter used are charged at a higher rate up to a certain level. Still, if you don’t use any energy you’re not charged anything.

As others have said, Ofgem has basically ( imo correctly) taken the view that customers should at least cover the fixed costs of supplying them with energy.

Otherwise, they found very low user customers were being subsidised by other customers who effectively faced higher bills as a result.

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