Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what information his Department holds on how many households are on energy suppliers' standard variable rates.

BEIS run a quarterly survey of domestic electricity and gas suppliers. This survey has coverage of around 85 per cent of the market. Data is supplied to BEIS, on numbers of customers by tariff by region by payment type, but as this data is supplied in confidence, individual tariff or company data cannot be made publically available.

Aggregate statistics are produced and published as part of our quarterly energy prices (QEP) publication. In quarter 1 2017, we estimate 66 per cent of standard electricity and 65 per cent of gas customers were on variable tariffs. Our current methodology does not breakout standard variable tariffs from other variable tariffs.

Data can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/quarterly-domestic-energy-price-stastics