Lack of price transparency is a major problem in energy markets and also with things like mobile phones. When consumers can't compare prices between sellers easily it means sellers can take advantage of buyers lacking information and can hike up their prices.

One thing that always amuses me is how the right wingers always like to say how the free market is best. If there are issues like the minimum wage or trade union rights the right wingers jump up and down and say "this is interfering with the free market".

But they are strangely lukewarm at campaigning on issues like this - or a lot of the behaviours in the banking sector which are based on taking advantage of uninformed customers in exactly the same way.

so, let me get this straight, the pm (a tory who kills babies and kittens) comes out and says that at the end of a customers fixed rate term, the energy company should automatically put the customer on their lowest available tariff (as opposed to the 2nd highest one that e.on just shoved me on) and people are complaining he's a fool for saying it because they think the energy companies will just hike the prices and form a cartel unlike what they've been doing for years?

Has anybody who has so far posted actually looked at the chart accompanying the article? Retail margins are not the cause of ever-increasing power bills - rising costs are.

Some of those costs are avoidable to a degree - customer churn (i.e. changing suppliers) costs a fortune (all the companies spend a lot of money chasing and retaining customers which, oddly enough gets added everybody's bill and in the end is a zero-sum game), as does renewable energy (in the UK a significant component of the wholesale energy cost and much more expensive than fossil fuels) and supply reliability (if people were willing to accept a less reliable electricity system some costs could come down considerably).

The real question to me is why aren't people given the right information to make choices? For example, do you want to pursue green energy policies, or do you want to abandon them and pay lower bills? Would you accept lower electricity system reliability (e.g. say outage 20 hours a year) in return for a £ saving?

All of these things can and should be quantified so people can make informed choices. As it is, too many of the debates are hijacked by politics (in the case of green energy) or simple inability to question orthodoxy (reliability is king).

Well thats even better, I'd pay with my own money to see two aged Lords in Ermine thumping each other with windmill arms over a sack of wool - and the aftermath of holding best steak to cartoon black eyes and bags of ice held to heads would be even better.

Extrapolating your argument to its logical conclusion would mean that you weren't placed onto the fixed term rate in the first place because it wouldn't be the cheapest - taking Camerons proposal at its exact word the electricity company would be breaking the law, comitting a criminal offence, by offering you a fixed term rate that wasn't their cheapest rate.

Indeed, fixed terms would be impossible administer any longer because inevitably at some point in their life they would become not the cheapest option and therefore illegal.

Those are exactly the words he used, rather ineptly, and caught his own Engery Dept out in the course of doing so, and prompted the Energy Suppliers to issue a statement saying that this was the first that they had heard of this proposal.

I don't think he's serious about it at all, just looking for something to throw at the opposition during their Tuesday squabble.

Indeed. And Scottish & Southern only have 3 tariffs. But then Eon and EDF both have 5. British Gas have 7 and Npower have 9.
That's 32 tariffs to compare just from the Big 6 energy companies. All with different Tier 1 & 2 prices or consumption, different standing charges, monthly fees, discounts, leaving fees, or tie-in periods.
There is a reason why so many people don't regularly switch their energy provider and at least a part of the reason why is that it is very complicated to work out.

I don't see how tariff and price simplification could be a bad thing.

I'm with Co-operative Power, they have one tarrif.

There, thats easy isn't it.

Being a members co-operative with no shareholders to satisfy they simply promise that you will always have the cheapest rate for gas or electricity that they can offer, everyone will have that same price, and the more members they have the cheaper the price will become due to their purchasing power.

They don't promise to be the cheapest, but then nor do any of the other energy providers, they promise to be as competitive as they can be and to pass that back to their members.

And you get a divvy too.

What, Cameron pops round too?

I hadn't realised it was that crazy.

But spot on about why – and why people don't make change very often.

It's another of those things where we're all supposed to spend huge chunks of our lives spent researching this stuff, instead of actually having someone or some company actually behaving in a trustworthy manner and with consideration for the customer and an ethos of service.

The average energy bill works out to be about £3.50 per day. Which in reality isn't an awful lot to heat a property, cook, and power all the entertainment that the average house needs.

The people who are supposedly in "fuel poverty" are probably the ones who spend significantly more than that per day on cigarettes, or booze, or gambling without thinking twice about it.