Six energy firms under investigation for price rises

most of our gas and a fair amount of our electricity is imported.why oh why do we allow ourselves as a nation to be held to ransom by these foreign companys? cast your mind back to the days when thatcher privatised everything the utility companys included.that evil woman has a lot to answer for.utility companys should be owned and run by britain and not dependant on the whims of foreigners who seek to rip us off.what happened when they found north sea oil and gas?we were promised cheap gas and oil but it never materialised. we got ripped off by our own politicians and they continue to do it now.i have no faith in any of them as in my opinion they all lie through their hind teeth and are only interested in feathering their own nests and couldn't give a monkeys about the people they are supposed to serve.

@Crispvs - Despite what you may have been told British Gas has a whole pricing team that works out how much profit they expect to make from the various tarrifs they charge. How do I know? Well I know some of the people that work there and I sit in Ofgem/industry meetings and argue with them! One of the biggest problems is that the domestic market mainly uses tarrif pricing rather than fixed term annual prices (like an insurance quote). Tarrif pricing makes it difficult to assess how much profit the Big 6 will make from a tarrif when they set it and complex to work out how much they did make after the bills have been set. The Industrial and Commercial market is virtually all either 'fixed term' or 'index priced'. In simple terms: 'Fixed price' is a set price for usually 12 months - The supplier will buy the energy they expect you will use from the wholesale market on the day that you accept the contract. This gives the customer some certainty about the price they will pay for their energy and is usually cheaper than a tarrif price. 'Indexed price' is a variable price that changes as the commodity market price changes (often this is a 'on the day' or 'day ahead' price) - The supplier will buy the energy on or just before you use it from the wholesale market. This is usually the cheapest way to buy but is uncertain. If the market goes up in price you will immediately feel the effect.

@ ACL - The reason for this higher rate for the first units is to recoup the costs that the supplier must pay irrespective of the number of the further units you use. A good example of this is the cost to rent the gas meter (last time I checked, about £15/year) or send a meter reader to a customers site (about £6 a read). For a domestic gas user about 25%-30% of the costs are non-commodity (gas) costs. The rest is the cost of getting the gas from the entry terminals at the coast to the customers own pipes and then billing them for it. The supplier will also include in here the costs of running the various fuel poverty and insulation schemes the government requires them to operate. (If you thought that the these things come 'free' think again - it all gets bundled into your charges). You may wonder why the suppliers do not just charge a standing charge like they used to. The answer is that some consumers use tiny amounts of gas and generally these are poor or old people (I know its wrong to stereotype but in this case trust me the data suggests this is true). Consumer Focus (previously Energywatch) therefore lobbied to stop domestic suppliers charging a standing charge. You may have worked out that this means that the supplier will not recoup all the non-commodity costs for these customers. Again the costs of this will get built into the pricing models to set the price. The solution to this is price transparency (like large firms in the Industrial and Commercial market already get).