@joelanman I agree. But I find it hard to call a relatively modest per-customer profit "disgusting". Especially when the majority of shareholders appear to be pension schemes.
@Edent You're really missing the point. It's that energy companies made massive profit during a crisis where people couldn't afford to heat their homes that's disgusting. You've just created this straw man of how much profit exactly and it's weird
@Edent@joelanman objectively speaking, £969m is a massive number - no? Regardless of where it's come from. Like, if we put all the blood in blood banks into a swimming pool it would be large, even though it's only come in pint-size portions.
I think it's like the Doctor Who meme. It is contextual.
Even if British Gas were non-profit, households would save about £1 per week.
Is £1 a lot? For a Freddo? Yes. For a car? No. For an energy supplier's profits? Maybe.
@Edent@joelanman see, I don't know if I agree with this '£1 a week' thing, because it assumes that the profit is being equally shared across the population - which needn't necessarily be true. After all, it's not currently being shared equally amongst the population of shareholders.
@jonodrew True, that's where averages break down.
Someone with the capital to buy new appliances probably pays less for energy than someone who can't afford the outlay.
But without finer-grained data, I can't draw a distribution.
Not sure what you mean by population of shareholders though? I haven't dived deep into their structure.
@Edent sure, but I'm not asking you to. I think I - and probably @joelanman - are imagining what would happen if that large sum of money were not paid to shareholders, but was instead disbursed to people in need - or, preferably, not collected in the first place.
I accept that some things are contextual. For me, there's no context in which a profit of £969m is not a large number. I think we disagree on that!
@jonodrew@joelanman
Fair. In context though, if all that profit went to charitable causes, it would be the equivalent of an average rise in charities' incomes of about 8%.
Not nothing, but also not a large number.
I think we both agree that necessities shouldn't be profit making. But if it weren't collected at all, then the pension funds which invested in British Gas would make less money. So we'd have to encourage people to save more for retirement.
@joelanman@Edent indeed. Making any profit in such circumstances seems unjustifiable. (I’d argue that making a profit from basic necessities is always unconscionable tbh.)
I think it’s about more than just the profit cap in the existing context but how that context came about: if domestic energy supply was entirely not-for-profit, would prices have risen so much in the first place?
@Edent@joelanman certainly some price increase would have happened.
But I don’t know if there’s any reason to think that the current model has led to great innovation and kept prices particularly low since the 80s, for example. So it seems that a not-for-profit model would have been no worse than the current, if not actually better.
(The precise level of profit is beside the point I think: any amount is inappropriate under the circumstances.)
@benjamineskola I think I disagree about the level of innovation. My (non-BG) provider offers me an API, lets me sell excess solar back to them, and provides me with time-of-day pricing if I want it. They're also quick to answer customer service messages by email.
I honestly don't think that would have happened without competing retail companies.
@Edent perhaps. I don’t have any strong evidence on that point — only the feeling that the market in energy is sort of artificial and so of questionable benefit.
Maybe also relevant that Octopus operates internationally so there’s competition on that front even if domestic competition is ineffectual.
@joelanman Agree with the basic point, but I think there is some accounting trickery here. They were made to make a loss in a previous period due to gov caps, and allowed to make som/all of it back this time. You'd need to average profits over the entirety of the crisis.
(but yeah again, agree that commodities monopolies shouldn’t be privatised)
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