IN THE WEEK when the giant oil and gas company Shell announced record profits of £32.2 billion, on the back of the soaring cost of energy, the energy providers in the UK were exposed as making huge profits at the expense of the poorest sections of the working class.
British Gas, owned by the Centrica company, stood accused of being responsible for a regime that saw bailiffs, armed with court orders, entering homes to instal prepayment meters.
Prepayment meters force customers to pay for their energy in advance through continually having to top up cards at convenience stores.
When they run out of money, they are classed as self-disconnected and condemned to going without heat or light.
In January, Citizens Advice issued a major report that showed that 3.2 million people had their energy supplies cut off last year as they ran out of credit – the equivalent of one person every ten seconds – leaving them to freeze in the dark.
With global energy prices soaring during the winter, fuelled by the sanctions imposed on Russian gas and oil, energy suppliers have stepped up the use of court warrants giving them the legal right to force their way into homes to instal prepayment meters.
The report estimates that 600,000 people were forced onto prepayment meters in 2022, nearly double the number in 2021.
Centrica recently announced an expected near eightfold increase in its earnings, due to its balance sheet being boosted by soaring wholesale gas prices as a result of sanctions on Russia. It reinstated a £59 million pay-out to shareholders.
While Centrica was revelling in its profit expectations, an investigation by an undercover journalist revealed the true extent of the pain being inflicted on the most vulnerable, the poor and disabled.
The investigation revealed that the agents employed by British Gas (Arvato Financial Solutions) to enforce court orders, took no notice of the vulnerability of the people whose homes it entered to instal the meters.
The courts themselves do not take into consideration the vulnerability of those subject to these orders, following the Tories ‘relaxing’ the rules for magistrates to issue warrants.
Now magistrates are inundated with mass applications for warrants with no opportunity for any objections.
Energy firms can gain permission to force entry at the cost of £22 per warrant, with courts granting up to 1,000 at a time in hearings that last 20 minutes.
This cost will then be recovered by the company from the household along with a charge of up to £150 for having the meter forcibly fitted.
Households must be made to pay for the privilege of being cut off by the energy companies!
Even those households with children under 5 or with disabled and vulnerable occupiers, who are supposedly exempt, are being rushed through this process that amounts to nothing more than a mass campaign of disconnection by the back door.
Naturally when the full extent of this outrage became public, the boss of Centrica, Chris O’Shea, expressed his ‘horror’ and complained that Arvato ‘has let us down’.
The Tory energy minister Graham Stuart was equally appalled, saying British Gas should ‘hold their heads in shame’. Not enough shame to make the company ban this practice outright.
All British Gas has said is – it will suspend forcefully installing prepayment meters until after the winter, – with no guarantee it won’t come back.
In April, the cap on energy will be increased by the Tories from £2500 to £3,000 and the £400 per household energy rebate will also end, plunging millions more households into fuel poverty at a time when the giant energy companies are rolling in massive super-profits made on the backs of workers and their families.
The working class has demonstrated that enough really is enough and that they are not prepared to be driven back to the poverty of the 1930s.
Now the immediate demand must be to force the TUC to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government that will nationalise all the energy companies along with the major industries and banks, bringing in a socialist planned economy.
Only socialism can provide a future for workers, by dumping capitalism into history’s dustbin.