The boss of British Gas has said that losing its spot as Britain’s biggest energy supplier for the first time in four decades should “galvanise” its staff to focus on customer service and lowering bills.
Chris O’Shea, the chief executive of Centrica, which owns British Gas, said monitoring its customer service was an “obsession” that would continue after Octopus Energy toppled it from the position as the largest energy supplier in the market last year.
“This is something that should galvanise my wonderful colleagues at British Gas, but I don’t sit looking at league tables trying to figure out if we’re first, second or third,” O’Shea said.
“What I look at, on a daily basis, is how quickly they’ve answered the phones for our customers, what is our complaint rate, what is the price we have given our customers, what is the service they’ve been given? That will continue to be my obsession,” he added, as Centrica reported a slump in profits.
The supplier’s customer service has come under fire in recent years as the energy crisis has caused bills to rise, and households have raised concerns about faulty smart meters.
Losing top spot to Octopus came almost four decades after British Gas was privatised under Margaret Thatcher. This was described as “quite honestly the biggest development in the domestic retail energy market since it opened”, by Dan Morris, the chief executive of the consulting firm Cornwall Insight.
British Gas managed to keep its customer base relatively steady last year, despite rising competition in the market, according to Centrica’s financial results, published on Thursday.
Centrica said the supplier now served 7.46m households, compared with 7.53m in 2023. This means British Gas holds 23.1% of the market, narrowly behind Octopus, which grew its share of the market to 23.7% of households in Great Britain by the end of last year.
O’Shea said keeping energy bills lower would rely on the UK building “a resilient energy system with an abundant source of supply”.
He confirmed that Centrica was still in talks with the government over plans to invest in keeping its Rough gas storage facility open, and in building a new nuclear power plant alongside French utility EDF at Sizewell C, in Suffolk.
The FTSE 100 utility company has warned that gas bills could be billions of pounds higher unless the government supports its planned £2bn investment to upgrade the Rough gas storage site off the Yorkshire coast.
O’Shea said that the UK’s biggest gas store, which was loss-making in the second half of last year, would not remain open unless it was a financially sustainable asset. The company did not need government funds, he said, but hoped to secure similar revenue guarantees as those offered to other energy infrastructure projects.
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Centrica is also in talks with the government to take a minority stake in Sizewell C but he stressed that any commitment would have to “give us the returns we need”.
The FTSE 100 company reported adjusted earnings of £2.3bn for last year, down by a third from 2023 when its profits reached £3.5bn after a £500m windfall from the energy regulator.
Ofgem allowed all suppliers to recover the unexpected costs of the energy crisis in the first half of 2023 by adjusting the energy price cap, which helped British Gas to a profit of £751m for the year.
The household supplier’s operating profit slumped to £297m last year, but Centrica said that excluding the impact of the one-off Ofgem allowance meant its performance was “relatively comparable” to the year before.
