“What happens next
If we do not hear from you, we will call at your property to inspect your meter on the above date.
If we’re unable to insepect the meter ont this date, due to our legal obligation we will have no option but to apply to a Magistrate for authority to enter your property to carry out this essential inspection and reading.”

This is a plain policy of harassment. You can not make appointments by negative feedback.

Inertia is a powerful force.

Another powerful force is the Internet and uswitch.com. I am no longer a British Gas customer.

The barriers to anyone else entering that market on the sort of scale they’d have to do to compete effectively nationwide are huge. They turned a national public monpoly into a private cartel and it will take another generation of restructuring to enable real competition.

I’d say energy supply was one of the most protectionist industries with loads of government interference still to be rooted out.

When one argues (as one does) that private companies competing in a free market are the best way to provide a service, the socialist in the conversation will say “but what about British Gas?”. And you know, it’s quite hard to reply to that. Why is British Gas so fucking awful? We all know it’s awful, we’ve all heard the stories, we all know there’s a non-trivial risk that something awful will happen to us, we all have a choice of supplier, so how come they still exist?

I just don’t get it. They are proof-by-counter-example of the failure of the free market. In the true sense of “prove the rule” (i.e. test the rule) there must something very significant we can learn about free market economics by the continued existence of this corporate coprolite.