Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

As Mr. Foley said, it is a shared challenge for regulators and policymakers throughout the EU as to what to do when we have these kinds of gas prices. Our focus is on protecting consumers and ensuring they can manage through the winter. We know that must be difficult for customers at the moment. It is important to remind people of the protections in place for vulnerable customers. One area of which we know there is not as much awareness as there should be is that customers can register to be a vulnerable customer if they are either critically dependent on electricity, for example, for assistive technologies for independent living, or if they are particularly vulnerable to disconnections in the winter period by reason of age or health. In those cases, a person registered as a critical services customer will not be disconnected for reasons of non-payment. For those registered as priority customers because they are particularly vulnerable, there is a moratorium in place every year. This means those customers cannot be disconnected between 1 November to 31 March. That protection is in place as part of our supplier handbook suite of protections.

Over the course of the winter, a halt is also called to disconnections for all customers, usually between 9 December and around 11 March. The other element that is really important is that all customers are protected all the time by the energy engage code, which means an engaging customer will not be disconnected. If customers are engaging with their supplier, either by entering into a payment plan or coming to some arrangement around bill payment, whether it is a prepayment meter or otherwise, they will not be disconnected. One of the important areas that we want to focus on is ensuring that customers are aware of the energy engage code and the need to engage with their supplier.

Those are the kind of protections we have in our supplier handbook. We also have significant engagement with our customer stakeholder group, which includes the Money Advice & Budgeting Service, MABS, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and other NGOs that give us considerable support in understanding the issues facing customers in these difficult times.

We are bringing that group together with energy suppliers this week to go through what we think might be coming up this winter. If there is more that we can all collectively do to support customers at a time of high prices and, obviously, what will be difficulty in paying bills, we will do that. One of the key areas we want to help customers avoid is building up debt over this time because that can put them in real difficulty as those large bills come through in the winter.