One million of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country have been forced onto prepayment meters by the courts in the last two years. These people were in debt to their energy companies, because they couldn’t afford to pay their bills.
Energy companies aren’t allowed to just switch off your supply. So, instead, they work with the courts to force you onto prepayment. That way you ‘switch yourself off’, when you can’t afford to pay. This happened to 3.2 million people last year.
1,500 a day
The rules were changed in the last few years to make it much easier for the energy companies to get away with all this. Last year, courts were switching over more than 1,500 a day.
The Tory government is weak, under pressure from the strike wave, and fearful of provoking further working-class anger. So it has now temporarily been made harder to force customers onto prepayment meters. But a whistleblowing magistrate judge said that even under the old system, the energy companies got their way in the vast majority of cases.
We can’t rely on the whims of a Tory government, the capitalist courts or the energy companies to look after vulnerable customers. They all put profit before people.
Nationalise
The energy giants should be nationalised, under the democratic control of the working class, with no compensation paid to the fat-cat owners.
And we can’t trust this partial pause on one type of pre-payment switch. Working-class communities, coming together to defend families, could forcibly block energy companies and bailiffs when they try to install prepayment metres.
