Switching energy suppliers is very much like switching boyfriends. As soon as you do it, the one you just left immediately drops their prices while the one you’ve switched to starts changing their terms and edging their prices back up again. It’s a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ conspiracy.
Three years ago, for example, I was stuck in a dead-end relationship when another guy came along and gave me a sales pitch that made my eyes pop out on stalks. He said all the buzz words: marriage; children; Nissan Qashqai (it’s a family car). So I switched.
Three years later I have only now been told about the small print. When he said he was very much looking forward to settling down quite soon what he actually meant was that he never intended to settle down ever. It’s only a matter of semantics but it certainly has landed me in a pickle. I was 35 when I met him and the possibility of one of David Cameron’s tax breaks for married couples was not completely beyond the bounds of possibility.
Now I can’t get to sleep at night for the deafening clunk of the big hand of the you-know-what clock moving inexorably towards midnight while thoughts of all the smug marrieds getting financial perks on top of every other perk they already enjoy — happiness, companionship, vast economies of scale, smugness — haunt my every waking hour. For the first time in my life I understand why a woman might find herself running a key along the side of a sports car.
Bugger, I keep thinking. If only I’d stayed with the other guy, who has of course now got engaged. Although we really did detest each other by the end, I calculate that if I’d stuck it out with him — maybe lived in separate parts of a very large house — I might be looking forward to being welcomed into the moral highground club with a little pat on the tax return from the Tories after 6 May.
If I find out in a few months’ time that the other one has got married I really will go totally tonto. Not because I am broken-hearted. Because I have been swindled. Taken for a ride. Conned. Defrauded. Cheated out of tax cuts. Agh, my God, it hurts.
I’ve put up with all sorts of silliness on the basis that if I remained a loyal customer for long enough the odds must surely favour me being rewarded. That and some dreadfully inconvenient stuff called ‘being in love’, which, to be honest with you, I’m not sure I can recommend.
The worse thing is that I’ve now got to start all over again and do a whole load of stuff I really can’t be bothered with. I want to cut straight to the good bit where it’s just eating spaghetti in front of Dancing On Ice, but apparently this isn’t allowed. You have to go back to square one.
Anyway, the point of this is not to tell you about my calamitous ‘love’ life. I give you the preceding details only by way of background to a far greater scandal. Which is that British Gas rang me the other day to ask if I wanted to switch to them from EDF. When I had stopped opening and shutting my mouth in dumbstruck exasperation, I told them that when I last switched suppliers, from British Gas to EDF, about three years ago and while distracted by romantic matters, as reverse serendipity would have it, it prompted an immediate British Gas price crash. If they think I am about to play the Lottery of Doom with my energy supply again they are very much mistaken.
She didn’t seem convinced and kept going on about how much she would like to check what I could be saving. It would only take about 20 minutes and require me to dig out 110 back copies of old bills from the cupboard under the fish tank. I said look, I’ve got form on switching. I suck at switching. I will never, ever profit from anybody offering me a better deal.
She then started pleading in a voice which reminded me horribly of something else that if I would only give her a chance she would prove to me how much she could solve all my problems. With a heavy heart I said, ‘Oh, go on, then, for old time’s sake.’ And she tapped away at her computer and chirruped, ‘That’ll be a saving of £150 a year!’
Which, coincidentally, is about what I would get from one of Mr Cameron’s married tax breaks. What’s the betting that, if I go for it, EDF will immediately drop their prices even further. Pretty damn certain, I would say.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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