The boss of Npower said yesterday that the company tried to do “too much, too soon” as it reported huge losses and confirmed the loss of 2,400 jobs in the UK.
The company made a loss of £154m in 2015 and lost 315,000 customers in Britain, partly as a result of poor service and billing problems that stopped it collecting money from households.
Npower, which still serves 4.77 million customers, was fined a record £26m by Ofgem, the industry regulator, in December. Between September 2013 and the end of 2014, it had received more than 2 million complaints from customers, many of whom had received bills that arrived late and were sometimes inaccurate. Its German parent, RWE, is starting a two year programme to get the company back on track.
“What happened there was a disaster,” said RWE’s chief executive Peter Terium. “We hope to be out of the valley of tears in the UK by 2018.”
But the Npower chief executive Paul Coffey said that billing problems would continue to some extent through 2016, as the company tried to resolve its systems problems.
Mr Coffey, who took over from Paul Massara last August, admitted the energy giant’s failings, saying: “Energy should be simple for our customers and we have complicated it.” He added: “They [the results] show a business that tried to do too much, too soon while not focusing enough on the fundamentals in a constantly changing market.”
Unions condemned the job cuts yesterday, with Unite’s national officer Kevin Coyne saying staff “should not be made to pay for the company’s past mismanagement”.
Npower’s customer supply business showed a £99m loss, while RWE’s British power stations made a loss of £55m due to the low price of wholesale electricity.
Npower, along with the other big power companies, has reduced bills in recent months but been criticised for not lowerin
