Email a gas and electricity boss

Photograph by 38 Degrees

*UPDATE*  This morning, Scottish Power finally announced they too will drop their prices. They have announced a small gas price cut of 5%.

Are we finally starting to tackle the gas and electricity rip-off? A week ago, 38 Degrees members started asking the big gas and electricity companies an awkward question: how come global prices have dropped, but our bills are still sky high? Our 90,000-strong petition started making the news and suddenly the companies started to get jittery.

As the numbers on the petition grew, one after another, EDF, British Gas, Scottish & Southern Energy, npower and now E.ON have announced they will at last drop prices. But they’re still only offering to pass on less than half of the savings, with price cuts of around 5%. Meanwhile Scottish Power are still refusing to budge at all.

The companies are hoping we’ll settle for these small price cuts. Let’s show them we’ll keep the pressure building until they pass on all the savings. The heads of all these companies need to personally understand that after years of price hikes, we’ve finally had enough.

Can you take 2 mins to email one of these company bosses and ask them to stop ripping us off?

Phil Bentley, Tony Cocker, Ian Marchant, Vincent Derivaz, Volker Beckers and Keith Anderson. We’ve got the email addresses of each of these six highly-paid chief executives. They probably don’t understand what it’s like to struggle to cope with price hike after price hike – and they won’t be used to hearing directly from thousands of us who do.

When they see an avalanche of emails from fed-up customers and potential customers, alarm bells will start ringing at their company HQs. They’re the men in charge – and they’ll be the ones held responsible if customers start leaving in droves. They’ll be picking up the phone to board members and scheduling emergency meetings to decide what to do.

The more of us that email a company chief, the more they’ll feel the pressure to cut their prices, and fast. Can you join in?

We know that when we work together in big numbers we can win. It’s true for politicians, like when our half-a-million strong petition showed them they couldn’t sell off England’s woodlands. It’s even more true for big businesses who want our custom every day – not just our vote once every five years.

38 Degrees volunteers gathered in London this morning to hand in the 90,000-strong petition to the offices of E.ON. A few hours later, E.ON phoned the 38 Degrees office to tell us they’re dropping their prices too – but only by 6%.  Let’s make sure the men in charge of our nation’s biggest gas and electricity companies can’t miss us in their inboxes as well as outside their office windows.

Can you e-mail the chief of a big gas and electricity company today?

Two of Britain’s smaller gas companies – Co-operative Energy and Ovo Energy – cut their prices before any of the biggest six suppliers.  If E.ON, Scottish Power, British Gas, EDF, npower and Scottish & Southern don’t get their act together, they can expect to lose a flood of customers to their smaller rivals in 2012.