Wolverhampton Landlords, be Aware!

In recent years, energy bills have become less about what you use, and more about what you are charged for being connected.

Standing charges have risen sharply across the UK (see the FSB's report here) and the new change to the Targeted Charging Review bandings mean that properties can find themselves locked into higher charges – even when usage drops.

The idea of targeted charging was to shift the costs for maintaining the creaking National Grid away from unit prices (price per kWh) and on to Standing Charges, based on the capacity for using energy.

This was partly due to high energy users being able to minimise their costs with clever energy management strategies, so this policy was devised in an attempt to more 'fairly' distribute the huge costs incurred by the Grid, partly due to relying on intermittent renewable energy sources, many miles away from where the energy is needed.

This was meant to target those who use most but, like every process designed to fix something, an unwitting negative result pops up somewhere else.

An example of this in Wolverhampton is a former KFC restaurant, empty for five years, and now being converted to a different purpose, with drastically reduced energy consumption levels.

They have been quoted £20 per DAY standing charge, which is £7,300 a year before any usage charges.

The owner was expecting his TOTAL annual energy bill to be around £6k - £7k so this was a shock, and totally unplanned for in his business model.

The National Grid information is still based on the old consumption and capacity, so the Targeted Charging Review bandings are now way too high, and inflexible too... they will only change the bandings on April 1st of each year... which doesn't sound very targeted to me. Or fair.

This case is still ongoing, and it looks like Wolf Pack has found a solution after much research, communications and persistence... but it is not over yet, two months on.

This means the customer is still on deemed rates... annoying but more preferable than committing to a 12 month contract estimated to cost £24,000, more than three times what they had planned for.

Prevention is better than cure so Wolf Pack are hoping to partner with local landlords to draw attention to this issue and advise on how to prevent it.

It is a hidden risk for landlords and managing agents: if a new tenant moves into a property where the previous occupier had far higher usage, the standing charge will still reflect that profile. This results in a huge cost shock which might derail the whole business, resulting in tenant complaints, and disputes before the lease even gets going.

How Wolf Pack Energy helps:

• We check TCR bandings for accuracy and guide you through the appeal process if you’ve been placed too high.

• We identify opportunities to lower standing charges, sometimes saving thousands annually across portfolios.

• We give proactive advice to ensure incoming tenants don’t inherit problems from the previous occupier’s usage.