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5 comments

  • FFS will this obscenity every end.

    I blame a certain prime minister/goverment for privatising everything. Time to renationalise all the utilities ;)

  • thats rancid

  • I took a few minutes and looked into this. Centrica owns more and does more than just British Gas Energy and looking at their website it appears that BGE is actually a pretty minor part of their profit picture as it represents only 98M GBP of the 3.3 Billion GBP reported by Centrica (and audited as such) in 2022.

    If you download their 2022 Financial Statement (PDF Warning) it appears that by revenue BGE is smaller than Centrica's Energy Market & Trading and by profit it is vastly smaller. If you jump to "4 . Segmental analysis (c) Adjusted gross margin and adjusted operating profit" you find that in 2022 BGE had an operating profit of only 72 Million GBP while EM&T and Upstream had 1,400 Million and 1,793 Million respectively.

    The overwhelming majority of their profit isn't coming via BGE charging consumers!

    So the article headline is wrong. British Gas (Energy) did not have a 969 Million GBP profit, the Centrica group did and based on historical performance it's quite likely that BGE only contributed 10% or so to that number.

    This doesn't mean that folks in the UK aren't being overcharged or that something shouldn't be done with your tax structure but this article leaves out critical detail that leaves the reader with false assumptions.

    • British Gas Energy continued the migration of customers onto its new digital energy platform (ENSEK) during the year. As at 31 December 2022, £2.1bn of revenue (2021: £0.4bn) was recognised from customers on this platform. Revenue from customers on the ENSEK platform is presented within the overall revenue figure in note 4

      Quote from your link. That is £400m profit just from customers that were brought in through an emergency scheme. This is also 2022 data, the article suggests that the profits are from Q1 and Q2 of this year.

      The UK’s biggest energy supplier reported profits of £969m for the first six months of 2023, up nearly 900% from £98m in the same period last year.

      Octopus also made a huge killing because of the cheap deal they got for taking on Bulb's customers. This is a story that is being repeated. The crime is not the profits, the crime is the lack of interest from government to protect the consumer. There needs to be an inquiry into donations Vs legislation in the next government imo.