E.ON and British Gas are to stop rolling their business energy customers into new contracts automatically at the end of their agreed term.

Are British Gas and E.ON really trying to provide a better service, or are they just pre-empting inevitable legislation?

Most organisation have experienced it. You receive a letter near the end of your electricity or gas contract informing you that there is only a few weeks or months left of your fixed-price agreement. It isn’t urgent (but it is!) so it gets left in someone’s in tray for a while.

Then when you finally get around to dealing with it, you discover that you were meant to write to the supplier up to 90 before the last day of your contract to prevent being ‘rolled over’ into a new deal at their (usually higher) ‘standard’ prices.

Utilities Savings would like to congratulate E.ON Energy UK and British Gas Business for being the first suppliers to abolish this practice completely.

Credit also has to be given to Ofgem, who have been more active in the last 3 years than ever before, helping to protect business customers from sneaky supplier tactics.

So far Ofgem has already implemented many rules, the first of which was Standard License Condition 7A. This meant that energy suppliers’ had to make it easier for customers to terminate their contracts entirely, and put a 1 year cap on any rollovers that were in the contract terms.

We have resource pages on Ofgem’s Condition 7A, and also about the wider Retail Market Review if you need to learn more.

No doubt the fact that Ofgem announced they were considering banning rollovers entirely as the next phase of the Retail Market Review has prompted this pre-emptive action from E.ON and British Gas Business.

What next? We could be about to see Ofgem to introduce an code of practice for TPIs, in an effort to deal with ‘rogue brokers’.

Press Releases: E.ON calls for industry-wide approach to ending automatic rollover contracts for SMEs | British Gas announces end to auto-rollover business energy contracts