Ms Marguerite Sayers:

This impacts on a significant number of customers. We have concerns around the peaks the Deputy mentions and that is what we are seeking to mitigate as much as we can. In our communication with customers we will reassure them about not losing supply and about setting up a new direct debit for them, if that is what they wish to do, as quickly as possible. We have approximately 300 internal staff and while they are not all working in this area and would not all be available to us, a proportion of them, at around 100, could be repurposed to help with a backlog if one arises. We also have around 400 agents in our contact centre and while they are fully occupied day in and day out, their focus can be reprioritised so rather than having a sales team or a loyalty team for a period of time, we will repurpose those agents and ask them to work on trying to deal with the peak. We are making plans to do that. Our communication with customers will also emphasise various routes through which customers can make the change themselves, if they contact us through our website. As I said, 35% of the 65,000 customers are regular users of our website and hopefully they will effectively self-serve and that will reduce the scale of the issue. That said, it is something of which we are very conscious and we will be keeping an eye on it.

Letters are going out in batches from the banks but unfortunately we cannot overlay with that because we do not know which customers are being contacted at what point. We will also be communicating with customers in batches but, unfortunately, they may not align. We know that as soon as we issue letters we are likely to see an uptick in activity and we have a plan for that.