Privatising our vital energy services was a disaster waiting to happen, though the Tories daren’t admit it (Row over rise in energy bills for 1m households, 3 March). Every house has one set of cables carrying electricity and one set of pipes with gas; in addition, all the key energy market prices are set nationally, regionally or even globally, so there can be little or no competition in supply costs. You could argue that having more buyers actually increases competition, pushing prices higher.
We may not realise it, but it has been cold in all of Europe, so price rises are inevitable. As your report says, the 7.9% rise in prices in the last six months was “driven primarily by increases in wholesale gas and electricity costs”. How will the government’s much-vaunted price cap help with that? I have changed suppliers almost every year in the last five or more years, but my bills are higher than ever, for a very simple reason: replacing the government-controlled system by more than a dozen private companies, all with highly paid chief executives and shareholders to keep happy, made the costs of the delivery process soar. How could it not?
The private sector is good when there are genuine differences in goods or services, but cannot do much in a market where the basic costs are fixed by others.
David Reed
London
• The perennial falsehood that privatised utilities lower prices by competition is well nailed by your report on E.ON’s price rise, with its all too familiar postscript that analysts expect “the other big players will follow suit”.
John Heawood
York
• Why is there a “row” over an average price rise of £22 per annum for a million households using gas and electricity? Over a million households also run on heating oil and the price swings all the time. I just paid a third more for a tankful than last June – an increase of £130. Who will raise a rumpus for us?
Mark Lewinski
Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire
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