Examination of Witnesses (Questions 114-119)
ENERGYWATCH
16 SEPTEMBER 2003
Q114 Chairman: Good morning, Ms Robinson
and Ms Pitkeathley, can I welcome you. I suppose in some respects
you represent the people we have spoken about least this morning
and we are very grateful to you for coming. I realise that in
some respects energywatch is a national organisation but you have
your regional dimensions and in a number of respects it is to
the regional offices that the brunt of the public's attention
is directed. BPI's report found there was wide variation of performance
of individual companies in this regard, as with many other aspects
of our ability to cope with the emergency. In your experience,
have the shortcomings in communication plans which were exposed
in last year's storms been rectified? We have talked about it
and had the representative of the companies just a couple of minutes
ago dwelling on this subject. Are you satisfied with the protestations
of "we will do better in the future" on this or do you
think there is still a gap between what you would like to see
or what you consider to be best practice that might even be improved
upon and performance which still leaves quite a lot to be desired?
Ms Robinson: The simple answer
to that is the jury is very much out. We have sent details about
the contingency plans and what has been put in place since the
October storms. There are certainly three companies we believe
are likely to do very well but, quite frankly, they did better
than the other companies anyway last October. So far as the other
companies are concerned there is a lot going on but we are not
yet convinced that there are good, robust communication strategies.
I am going to ask my colleague Carole Pitkeathley to talk a little
bit more about this because she has been very much at the forefront
of having these discussions with individual companies.
Ms Pitkeathley: I think Ann is
right when she said some companies did do particularly well during
the storms and that was reflected both in the early contact and
in the escalation processes that they have with the regional offices.
Some companies, as we have heard today, did not do quite so well
and in particular Aquila and EDF in the guise of 24seven and our
customer contact centre received a lot of calls about the inadequacies
of that. Energywatch has worked quite closely with these companies
to try and get some improvements but certainly in the latter two
companies we have seen very little improvement.
Q115 Chairman: When you say you have
seen very little improvement obviously it will only be tested
when there is a crisis of the kind that we encountered last year.
What gives you such grounds for the concern you have expressed
then?
Ms Pitkeathley: Yes, you are absolutely
right, it will only be tested then but we have had already a couple
of incidents where the communications were tested. On 28 August,
for instance, when London had the blackout through the NGC-related
incident, energywatch would have expected because the DNO had
customers off supply that we would get a call. We received calls
from consumers at about 6.30 to our customer contact centre. We
then tried to find out what was going on and it was 8.30 before
we received a call from EDF to let us know that supply was back
on and that call was made to our Regional Director for London
and the South East Region, so the consumer led the way there rather
than the company. Similarly, we had the more recent Hams Hall
incident. East Midlands Electricity Company contacted me within
minutes of supply being interrupted but we have yet to receive
a call from Aquila to tell us that its customers were off supply.
Ms Robinson: If I may add something
to this. To be quite frank, I was a bit alarmed when I heard this
morning in the evidence that EDF are only thinking about conducting
some sort of desk exercise with BT, I cannot remember whether
it is today or tomorrow. It is nearly a year ago, and it really
is not good enough, in our view.
Q116 Linda Perham: I did pursue with
EDF just before you came in at the back the incident in London
as a London MP and as somebody who could have been on the Underground
at that time. I looked at your supplementary evidence and I was
quite appalled by the story you have just told about the communication.
The Chairman pursued the point about as far as the public is concerned
they are not really interested in whether it is EDF or NGC, they
want the information and you also say in your main evidence: "If
recent events in London were the first test of an improved communication
strategy, in our view the test was failed." What could you
actually do about that other than be very exasperated? Is there
any action you could take to make sure that the improvements are
there because, as you have said, this was 28 August and we are
investigating today events on 27 October nearly a year before.
We have not seen in some cases that there has been any improvement
in communication.
Ms Robinson: Our principal role
is the one that we are carrying out at the moment, which is talking
to the companies and trying to get them to improve their processes
and also to talk to each other to introduce best practice. We
are together with Ofgem in a number of these areas and clearly
Ofgem will need to think through and want to think through—I
know they are doing this already—some of the incentives
that need to be in place. For instance, proper communication and
ability to communicate should be one of the things they take into
account when they are considering the issue of compensation and
payment of compensation.
Q117 Linda Perham: Also on this point
about communication between the regional offices, I think you
got the calls to the CCC and then found out the South East people
did not know about it until two hours later. You report about
the communication between regional offices and individual companies
being of a variable quality. Would you say it is a particular
problem in certain regions or do you highlight the problem and
literally name and shame the people that you are concerned about?
Ms Pitkeathley: Absolutely, that
is one of the tools in energywatch's armoury, this ability to
praise, name and shame. I think it is about establishing best
practice because once one company is able to embrace an escalation
process and use it effectively there is no reason, in our view,
why the rest of them cannot do the same. Sometimes when we get
into restoration of supply the companies tend to get caught up
in the technical aspects of it. A lot of the discussion this morning
is related to that. I think that they need to have proper measures
in place to make sure there is somebody banging on at them all
the time, "What about the consumer? What about the consumer?
Who needs to know?" We have our numbers out there with all
of the companies, personal numbers, directors' home numbers, mobile
numbers, etcetera, with a willingness on the part of energywatch
to take a call like this at any point because it enables us to
ramp up our resources to get the message out, which helps the
companies do the job which the Chairman was referring to before
about getting the information out when needed.
Ms Robinson: If I may add, I think
the bottom line issue is we should not have to be dealing with
a lot of calls. The companies should be making it very clear what
is happening and how people are going to be affected, but nevertheless
we have to be kept in the loop because people will get in touch
with us regardless how good the communication is. I think there
is also a major concern, it is not just a matter of telling the
general public what is going on, there have to be better systems
to enable people who are in vulnerable positions to ring in to
let the companies know what their personal position is. Proper
two-way communication has to be there as well.
Q118 Linda Perham: You would expect
people to ring the companies first? One of the aspects of the
EDF problem was that the recorded message said to ring energywatch
and when people got through they were not getting up-to-date information
anyway, so one company was diverting people to phone you when
they should have had a system in place where people would speak
to them directly.
Ms Robinson: Absolutely, it was
passing the buck. People were phoning us. We were in the dark
as well, we could not tell them anything more, and so the customer
is left in a worse position than they were before in the sense
that they thought somebody had got control over this and something
was happening and after a conversation like that they probably
realised things were not quite what they should be.
Ms Pitkeathley: If I could add
that not all consumers in the country were affected so there were
unaffected consumers who wanted to get through to us with their
own day-to-day business and their own day-to-day inquiries and
they were robbed of that opportunity because the companies did
not have sufficiently robust systems in place to enable them to
handle their own business.
Q119 Chairman: Do you think you have
got sufficiently robust systems to take account of emergencies
when you are seen as the ace in the hole, the last card in the
pack, call it what you want?
Ms Robinson: Yes, we have. We
have got numbers out there so that companies can get in touch
with us. We can ramp up our call centre very, very quickly. We
can get the messaging service with an extra message on very, very
quickly. We can also call in people to some of our regional offices
over the weekend if we have a really big explosion of calls. We
can put calls in that direction as well because for us it is absolutely
fundamental that the consumers are kept in touch with what is
happening.
Ms Pitkeathley: The point, though,
is we are only as good as the information we are getting in.
| 
