John Penrose MP: How to fight back against the gas bill and water rates rip-off

John Penrose is the Member of Parliament for Weston-super-Mare.  Follow John on Twitter.

Groaning about your gas bill? Wailing over your water rates? You aren’t alone. Most of us feel ripped off by our energy suppliers (and by our water firms, our banks and our phone companies too, for that matter). Worse still, we feel powerless to fix the problem. Partly because all those special tariffs are horribly confusing, so it’s impossible to be sure whether switching to a different tariff or another supplier would really be better or cheaper. And partly because switching is tricky, slow and might leave you in the lurch if something goes wrong halfway through.

Which means we’re all pretty fed up, and many families are struggling with the ever-rising cost of living. And the impact of high prices for power, water or transport on Britain’s employers is horribly damaging too. It raises costs, puts jobs at risk and slows growth; economists say we could grow by an extra 15% over the next ten years if we fix the problem. And, since economic growth and the cost of living are going to be central election issues after five tough years of austerity, the political stakes are sky high as well. Put simply, whoever owns this piece of economic turf by 2015, wins. It’s going to be where the battle is hottest.

So what’s the answer to making our gas, electricity or water more affordable in future? Well, a few consumer-friendly changes would be a good start. We should put power back into the hands of customers like you and me by making it much, much easier, quicker and safer to switch our accounts to a different bank, gas firm, or electricity or water company, so we can take our business elsewhere if we’re fed up. And we should blow away the fog around all the different tariffs and deals, so we don’t need a PhD to choose the one that’s best for us too.

John Penrose MP: How to save our High Streets and green fields in one go

John Penrose is the Member of Parliament for Weston-super-Mare.  Follow John on Twitter.

ConHome readers are intelligent, aesthetically literate folk so – of course – you’ll already be familiar with my article in The Daily Telegraph on protecting the UK’s favourite city and townscapes. But on the off chance you missed it, or if the details have temporarily slipped your memory, here’s the summary version: all cities are in permanent, slow-motion flux, so the skylines and views we all take for granted in our towns or cities have been built up from successive layers of old and new construction. With a few exceptions like London’s Mall or Bath’s Royal Crescent, they are accidental rather than planned. So some are gorgeous, while others are awful. If we want our towns and cities to be beautiful places to live and work – and, since most of us spend the majority of our lives in them, we should – then we must keep the good ones when, over centuries, the others are ripped down and redeveloped.

How? Well, we already protect individual buildings by listing them, and a few narrow views of places like St Paul’s Cathedral from specific vantage points too. But there’s nothing to protect the local, day-to-day beauty of your neighbourhood park, high street or canal towpath. So I’m proposing a system of ‘listed views’, like listed buildings, to make sure the best ones stay safe.

Now, as the man who wrote the Party’s policy on slashing red tape, you’d think I’m the last person to propose yet more rules and bureaucracy to tie up our developers and slow down the economic recovery. And you’d be right. Because, if we spend a little time deciding which views are worth keeping, we can relax the rules and regulations on all the others. For the first time, builders and developers would know their plans are safe from being ambushed by someone with a cap and clipboard deciding they need to preserve a view that isn’t officially designated on any map, of a building that’s nowhere near their site. Instead they’d simply check the list of protected views, work their plans around any that affected their site, and get cracking. If you’re willing to invest millions to regenerate a rundown urban area, you want speed and certainty. Slashing unpredictable bureaucracy that slathers on costs and delays would deliver it for you.