Rest In Pieces: The Competition Commission

John Robertson, member of the Cross Party Energy and Climate Change committee went on public record saying: “The biggest opacity is the profit making itself, if you look at the bill you get through the door, the understanding you have of it. There is a need for the companies to explain how they make their profit and where; also make it easy for the consumer to understand their bill. We can see what is happening on the retail side, but not on the generation side of the equation.

The companies are jealously guarding their information. It is strange that you have six large companies, who all charge roughly the same, have roughly the same increases in price, and yet they are all meant to be in competition with each other”

Natural Monopoly, Essential Goods and Regulation

If the public have a problem with the energy companies, they are first directed to Ombudsman Services, which suggests itself to provide ‘independent dispute resolution for the communications, energy, property and copyright licensing sectors’.

Ombudsman Services is funded by the companies it handles complaints about, which raises questions about conflicts of interest and influence. According to WhatDoTheyKnow.Com, a website which covers Freedom of Information requests to 15440 authorities, Ombudsman Services is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Read more…

The Emporium of Dangerous Ideas: Shifting the Axis by Karen Lawson

The Emporium of Dangerous Ideas is Scotland’s most innovative and ground-breaking education festival aimed at everyone who is passionate about education.

Although created, and curated by College Development Network, this two week national festival (6-19 June) provides unique opportunities for organisations and individuals (agents of change) to share and create ideas that could change our thinking and practice in relation to education. Read more…

Observation and Empiricism

The first observations could be data obtained from the library or information from your own experience.

Another source of observations could be from trial experiments or past experiments. These observations, and all that follow, must be empirical in nature – that is, they must be sensible, measurable, and repeatable, so that others can make the same observations. Read more…

The Rise of Offshore Business

Here we enter into getting a flash of history from one perspective, to understand some of the domains in which business deals take place. There are various market places, in which various types of business transactions occur. One of the most relevant ones to contextualise a globalised trading system is that of Offshore business. An offshore company is a legal entity established in a tax haven or offshore financial center, being protected by specific legislation which guarantees a status of partial or full tax exemption. Read more…

The Energy Companies Wear No Clothes

I have written these citizenship journalism articles as I have become increasingly interested in the hard details of what is driving fuel poverty as I and others encounter it. My experience with energy suppliers have been negative as a consumer which brings me to expect that the ‘customer’ is always wrong at every turn.
Energy companies yearly report increasing profits as my bills go up and up, and the service gets poorer and poorer. Similarly, the companies seem to be avoiding sufficient investment in sustainable infrastructure or technologies that will enable a society which does not squander intergenerational equity – i.e. the natural resources which belong to future generations.
Read more…