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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of energy suppliers using customer credit balances to fund low-cost acquisition tariffs.

Deliberately collecting more credit than is required to service customers, in order to fund acquisition tariffs, would be unreasonable and unsustainable.

In January this year, Ofgem introduced a suite of new rules to ensure that suppliers act in a financially responsible manner and do not take actions that may result in their competitors and consumers facing increased costs should they fail.

We await the outcome of Ofgem’s recent consultation on further measures that would require suppliers to automatically refund customers’ credit balances every year, and protect any amounts they hold above a certain threshold.