Thanks Tories: Privatised British Gas Makes £560 Million Profit as Consumers Strangled
The Tory and Labour privatised British Gas has made a cool $560 million profit this year, up by £181 million from last year, while ordinary British consumers struggle to make ends meet.
Operating profits for Centrica, the FTSE listed company which owns British Gas, are in the region of £1.9 billion for this year.
The Conservative Party privatised the gas supply industry with the Gas Act of 1986 with the promise that it would be run more efficiently and that the taxpayers would not have to contribute to its running.
This claim was almost instantly proven to be a lie, like 90 percent of everything else the Tory party says.
Taxpayers were forced to start paying for the creation of an industry regulator, the Office of Gas Supply (Ofgas). This had to be created to “protect customer needs” — in other words to try and protect consumers from rampant exploitation which followed privatisation.
Ofgas later became part of the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) whose cost is also borne by the taxpayers.
The fruits of the privatisation process are now coming home to roost. British Gas’s newest profits are a rise of more than 50 percent — despite the gas regulator “succeeding” in getting the company to reduce gas bills by 4 percent.
Two days ago, another of the Labour/Tory privatisation experiments, Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE) declared a 36 percent increase in profits for the past six months.
According to reports, all the other major energy suppliers, EDF and E.ON, are also making huge profits out of the deregulation of the British market. EDF is owned by the French state, while E.ON is a German company.
To make matters worse, wholesale gas and electricity prices have fallen by more than 50 percent since the middle of the year. This halving of the supply cost has not been passed onto the consumer, as it would have been if British Gas was still owned by the state.
According to consumer watchdog organisations, last year saw gas prices increased by an average of 42 percent.
Consumer rights organisation Consumer Focus said in an official statement that “Millions of customers struggling to afford their energy bills will find it difficult to understand how energy firms are making such healthy and, in some cases increasing, profits in the recession.”
On 30 July 2008, Centrica announced a 35 percent increase in the price of gas — which was till then the largest single price increase for an energy utility in modern British history.
Thanks Tories, we owe you one.
