Ms Issy Petrie:

It is different across the market.

It is not that one size fits all but we are definitely concerned that repayment plans that are negotiated are sometimes not appropriate or affordable. We really welcome the new regulations brought in by the CRU in the autumn of last year on having to offer a minimum period of 24 months in repayment plans. We see this as the start and would like to have seen more development. Going into next winter, we need to go beyond the idea of a minimum length and say the plan has to be affordable. There are principles of affordability in the supplier handbook but they are quite vague and, therefore, there needs to be much more development of what we mean by affordable to ensure more uniformity in how the assessment is made across the market.

We would definitely like to see more monitoring by the regulator and more data on the repayment plans. I think we have data on how many payment plans there are, how many are kept and how many are broken but I am referring to data on how long the payment plans are agreed for and the levels at which they are set. We would obviously like much more but these data would allow us to tell what is going on with the repayment plans and where things are going wrong or right. In this way, there would be oversight allowing us to build on best practice.