Welcome to an awfully big adventure

As part of The Big Switch, Jonathan Maitland will be blogging here – keeping you up to date with progress in the campaign.

Welcome to an awfully big adventure. This could be the start of something very significant indeed. For years now, we’ve felt helpless and shocked as the latest even-more-sky-high-than-the-last energy-bill has landed on our kitchen table.

Five hundred and forty what ??!?’ was the cry last quarter, I recall (But with a few more colourful adjectives thrown in). For millions of home owners in the UK, gas and electricity bills are now the biggest monthly outgoing – even more than the mortgage payments. 38 Degrees members agreed – we need to  do something about it, together.

So we are! All you need to do is sign up and then we can use our power as a group to bargain with the gas and electricity companies to give us the best deal and then we switch suppliers – it should be hassle free.

The more of us that sign up to this campaign, the more power we will have in our collective negotiations with the energy companies. Think Groupon: but without the fishy foot massages.

So how did we get here? Well, it’s pretty simple. Our energy bills are higher than they should be, because energy companies aren’t being run for the  benefit of the customers – us, in other words –  but for the benefit of the shareholders. Their raison d’etre is to make their investors as rich as possible. And they are doing just that. Recently, British Gas and its parent company Centrica made record profits of £2bn pounds in one year. So tell your friends , family and everyone you know about this project. Tell them that we are taking back the power and saving money on our gas and electricity companies. The fun, and hopefully the lower bills, start here.