Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

The final point on that is that we are actively engaging with all suppliers around when, not if, they will be passing on savings to customers. We are putting as much pressure as we can on them in that dialogue. As the impact of the hedging works through, we would hope to see some of those savings come through towards the end of this year. If one supplier was an outlier and did not pass on the savings, we would be calling that out and customers would be voting with their feet. This is why competition is important. Customers can see, and we give good information on this, where there may be discrepancies and so on. That is the dynamic that puts greater pressure on suppliers to pass on savings.

On the smart meter programme, I would like to think of it as an opportunity. We have this infrastructure now and we are starting to get better tariffs in place. We have suppliers that are more actively engaged on this. There is a huge opportunity there to make a change for the benefit of customers. That is why it is going to be a part of our demand-side strategy to bring forward proposals on this. This conversation, frankly, has been hugely helpful. Any customer looking at tariffs coming into this winter has probably been worried about making wrong choices. One of the things we noticed in our statistics, in addition to the switching, was that record numbers of customers were renegotiating with their supplier. They wanted to stick with the familiar but also get a better deal. Hopefully as the volatility comes out of the market we might see customers coming back in with a little bit more confidence from better data and willing to make choices. We will be promoting that. Government policy or policy from this committee is also helpful for telling customers there are other options out there and that they should take a look at them and consider them.

On the gas side, the Deputy raised an important issue. We have landed at the end of this winter with record numbers of customers in arrears and record levels of arrears in gas. We would normally have a summer cycle in which customers have lower gas demands so they might be able to catch up a little on their bills but the concern we have is that some of those customers are facing what they might see as an insurmountable wall of debt.