The NfCG website has discontinued its Price Comparison tables for domestic gas and electricity supplies. We do not have the resources to meet the sensible (voluntary) standards set down for price comparison services by Ofgem. At least four commercial operators are offering across-the-board price comparison services on the Internet, two of them meeting the Ofgem standards. All of them are interactive, so there is no longer a need for the NfCG service.
Or is there? We asked an NfCG member to try out the four services, using real data. We wanted to test the hypothesis that all of these services would tell him the three lowest cost suppliers for gas, for electricity or for `dual-fuel' supplies. This is his report.
Standards of service are important, but difficult to predict. I was looking for answers in pound units. Because I keep records I have a very good idea of my annual consumption of gas and electricity. Multiplying these by my present tariff rates gives a more accurate picture of my annual costs than the sum of my last four bills.
I logged on to four sites - Buy.co.uk, Kura.co.uk, Unravelit.com and Uswitch.com. Only Unravelit displayed the Ofgem symbol. Uswitch displayed the Which Webtrader mark. All four sites were easy to use, though Unravelit was slower to do its sums. My first test was to see how much attention the sites paid to my consumption data.
Buy.co allowed me to enter only my annual costs but asked for day/night percentages of my Economy? consumption. It did not specify what consumption figures it had derived from these costs and percentages. Kura.co also accepted only cost figures, but told me that it had used consumption figures which were about 5% higher than my known consumption for gas and about 1 % lower for electricity.
Unravelit offered me the choice of' consumption figures or annual costs but although it allowed me to opt for an ,,, Economy? supply did not ask me to give day/night figures. It also overestimated my gas consumption by 5% and my electricity consumption by 18%. When offered a single consumption figure for electricity it under-estimated my annual costs by 14%. Uswitch asked all the right questions, so I felt happiest with its answers.
So which three suppliers did the four services recommend as having the lowest prices? For gas supplies the four sites suggested six different suppliers for my needs. Three suppliers were picked by three of the services, with three others picked by one service each.
For electricity they suggested six different suppliers between them. Two suppliers were picked by three services, one supplier by two of them and three by one service each. (One supplier achieved a 1st and 2nd place).
For `dual-fuel' contracts they suggested seven different suppliers. One supplier was picked by three services, one by two services and five by one service.
There was a lot of difference in the costs suggested. For the three lowest cost suppliers identified by each service, gas costs ranged from £311 to £365, electricity prices from £408 to £444 and "dual-fuel" costs from £738 to £797. In the case of gas this could be attributed to Kura.co's use of higher consumption figures, but this was not true for electricity and `dual-fuel' contracts. One further point - for each of the services except Kura the loudest `dual-fuel' cost listed was higher than the sum of the lowest separate gas and electricity costs.
Even when identical annual cost figures were used, there was not much agreement between the services on the lowest cost suppliers except in the case of gas. Of the favourites (picked by three of the four services) Buy.co, Unravelit and Uswitch agreed on three of the gas suppliers, two of the electricity suppliers and one of the `dual-fuel' suppliers. Kura agreed only on one of the electricity suppliers.
Three of these four services will point you in the right direction, but use more than one, get quotations from the three lowest-cost suppliers listed by each, and do your own sums before you decide. Happy surfing!
In all these discussions about heating costs one tends to forget that we are mostly using fossil fuels which will never be replaced. Renewable wood for heating has been neglected in this country but now it is experiencing something of a high-tech renaissance. The technology of wood chip burning and gas analysis is not yet developed, as far as I know, for domestic heating so, until it is, throw on another log and put the chestnuts on to roast. You cannot do that with a balanced flue boiler! - John Brown
Last September the Prime Minister launched a campaign to ensure that everyone who wants it will have access to the internet by 2005. The campaign also sets out to ensure that all Government services are on-line by then and to make Britain one of the world's leading knowledge economies.
Brave words. However Government departments and agencies have more than 1,000 sites already and receive 20 million requests a week! Recent research by National Statistics revealed that one in five adults who use the internet do so to access Government services. A guide to what you can do online with Government is available at www. eenvoy.gov.uk/onlinenow.htm
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