Meter readings

[Anastasius]

Agreed the case for nationalising the parasites is very much stronger but a lot of the reduction of outages is due to under grounding of cables a process begun under the nationalised boards that would probably have proceeded more quickly had they remained in place ......

I'm not sure that I agree with you on that one. Round here most of the cabling remains above ground. A good tree pruning policy has helped minimise outages but the key factor is the attitude of Western Power towards customers and outages. Never ever got that in your 'good old days'.

[antongould]

I'm not sure that I agree with you on that one. Round here most of the cabling remains above ground. A good tree pruning policy has helped minimise outages but the key factor is the attitude of Western Power towards customers and outages. Never ever got that in your 'good old days'.

I bow to your local knowledge and experience - but the North Eastern Board was undergrounding at a pace and had a strict regime of tree pruning. It has to be said some Boards were better than others and I would submit NEEB was best of all! It was the only one, IIRC, that had repaid all its Government debt and it's profits were going straight to the Revenue ......

[umslopogaas]

EDF seem quite content for me to pay estimated bills, and send a man around once a year to read the meter. My use is pretty constant, so there isnt much of a correction. The power lines are maintained by Western Power, who are turning the power off all day on Thursday to replace a rotting power pole. Given that my power depends on three wires running between poles across the valley, power cuts are not too frequent: we do get them, usually because of trees I suppose, but I know it was once because some tractor driver cutting hedges cut through a stay wire and brought down the pole.

[Anastasius]

I bow to your local knowledge and experience - but the North Eastern Board was undergrounding at a pace and had a strict regime of tree pruning. It has to be said some Boards were better than others and I would submit NEEB was best of all! It was the only one, IIRC, that had repaid all its Government debt and it's profits were going straight to the Revenue ......

Aha...and so on the basis of one...just one, by your admission, well run Board, you're advocating a return to the dire service that the others gave ?

[antongould]

Aha...and so on the basis of one...just one, by your admission, well run Board, you're advocating a return to the dire service that the others gave ?

IMVVHO the others weren't as good as NEEB but were a lot better than today's crew of ineptitude - I have reasonably detailed knowledge of 3, NEEB, YEB AND MEB and all were vastly better than the Big 6 in terms of billing and collection ....

[ahinton]

Agreed the case for nationalising the parasites is very much stronger but a lot of the reduction of outages is due to under grounding of cables a process begun under the nationalised boards that would probably have proceeded more quickly had they remained in place ......

But can you be sure of that? Yes, there can be little doubt that there's been more profiteering (I almost wrote racketeering) on the part of power suppliers than on that of grid maintenence companies just as there arguably has been more on the part of train companies than on the rail network maintenance businesses but, in the case of electricity, a nationalised organisation would only be able to pursue cable burying (a process that's as laudable as it is necessary) to the extent that HM Treasury enables it to afford to do so and, given that, like replacing ancient and deteriorating water and gas pipework, it is a massive project that would occupy an amount of time equivalent to many governmental terms, the successful continuation of such work will always hang in the balance and be dependent upon a number of factors including the economy at any given time and the extent to which it permits HMT to allocate funds to it.

[ahinton]

IMVVHO the others weren't as good as NEEB but were a lot better than today's crew of ineptitude - I have reasonably detailed knowledge of 3, NEEB, YEB AND MEB and all were vastly better than the Big 6 in terms of billing and collection ....

Be that as it may, inefficient billing and collection eats into the profits of the supply company and is bad business, so one would reasonably assume that it's up to each such supplier to ensure that it makes as much profit as possible by billing and collecting properly! The trouble is that I suspect that many have become too dependent upon overcharging customers based on unresonable over-estimates of power usage that they've gotten complacent about their billing and collection efficiency in general terms.

Where "nationalisation" is concerned (and it's a misleadingly unhelpful term to describe government ownership and management of businesses in any case), I don't much care who owns and runs businesses as long as they're run fairly and efficiently and make healthy profits which, in the case of public service businesses, should be reinvested in those businesses to enable them to expand and provide more and better services in the future; if the government can do better in any of these than any private business enterprise, then it should, becaseu that's in everyone's interests including that of the business itself. What should never be forgotten, however - as I wrote above - is that state owned and managed businesses operate in the marketplace just as do those which are privately owned, because they have to procure goods and services in that market place, which fact makes the terms "nationalised" even more misleading.

[ahinton]

P. G. Tipps, for one, is a Pragmatic Centrist. As far as the major utilities and nationalisation and privitisation are concerned it has always seemed to him largely a question of choosing between two 'evils'. Many of those of us old enough to remember nationalisation do not have particularly happy memories of those days. There may well be a case for returning the power companies to state control because of the vital importance of supply but I haven't been convinced either way, tbh. Nationalisation and 'efficiency' were certainly not automatic bedfellows in my past experience.

Nor in mine.

As for, say, the railways I am in much less doubt. The current system, for all its undoubted faults, is much more efficient and customer-orientated than it ever was under state control, imvho. However, if that were to change so might my opinion!

I find your answer here too simplistic. As with power, the rail businesses divide into train operating companies and network maintenance ones, of which only the former are charged with customer interfacing in any case; if you consider the absurdly anomalous and woefully over-complicated fare and ticketing structures operated today by the former to be "customer-oriented" and "efficient", I would be astonished! Add to that that the full UK national rail timetable extends to an improbable 3,835 pages that occupy some 81.5MB in .pdf format and any sense of efficiency and customer orientation goes off the rails entirely!

So, every case on its merits is my simple-minded, non-political view

It's all very well holding such a view but only politicians can decide whether or not to "nationalise" or "privatise" a business...

[antongould]

X

Be that as it may, inefficient billing and collection eats into the profits of the supply company and is bad business, so one would reasonably assume that it's up to each such supplier to ensure that it makes as much profit as possible by billing and collecting properly! The trouble is that I suspect that many have become too dependent upon overcharging customers based on unresonable over-estimates of power usage that they've gotten complacent about their billing and collection efficiency in general terms....
.

I don't think they are complacent just to all intents and purposes inept and logically the level of underestimating is less than of overestimating as customers will tend do do something about the latter but not always about the former .......

[Cockney Sparrow]

[QUOTE=antongould;505767]Having worked in the industry, man and boy, for 45 years I could write a book or more correctly a horror story. The privatisation of the industry has left it a shadow of its former self in terms of efficiency and control especially on the supply side.QUOTE]

Thanks for spending the time to give an insiders view. Always valuable to us poor outsiders and of course much more reliable than anything in the media (in regards to my speciality, they always got it wrong, either through ineptitude, laziness or not wanting the facts to get in the way of "a "story").

Who'd have thought it - private enterprise taking over state assets, squeezing profits to meet the demands of fund managers and market analysts, and unwilling to invest......

Just my view, I admire your fortitude in the time you have spent here.

[ahinton]

I don't think they are complacent just to all intents and purposes inept and logically the level of underestimating is less than of overestimating as customers will tend do do something about the latter but not always about the former .......

Again, that's as maybe (and will doubtless vary from supplier to supplier in any case) but I have no confidence that this and other problems would suddenly disappear upon and because of "nationalisation".

[ahinton]

Who'd have thought it - private enterprise taking over state assets, squeezing profits to meet the demands of fund managers and market analysts, and unwilling to invest

To the extent that it pertains, is that any better than state enterprise taking over private assets and then having HM Treasury squeeze the amounts of taxpayers' money allocated to their management and operations? Cutback are cutbacks, whether they are applied to and/or affect state owned and managed industries or private ditto, but only government can implement them.

[antongould]

Again, that's as maybe (and will doubtless vary from supplier to spplier in any case) but I have no confidence that this and other problems would suddenly disappear upon and because of "nationalisation".

I'm not saying this would disappear as a result of nationalisation I'm saying with the regional structure and controls and processes of those days things would get much better.
And it doesn't vary from supplier to supplier at any time the number of underestimated readings exceeds the number of overestimated......

[ahinton]

I'm not saying this would disappear as a result of nationalisation I'm saying with the regional structure and controls and processes of those days things would get much better.

Even if that were true and demonstrable, I still question whether "these days" it would be possible - even assuming that it were desirable (which I don't) broadly to replicate the manner and matter of these industries' managements and day-to-day operations from four decades ago in what was then a very different society in so many pertinent ways.

And it doesn't vary from supplier to supplier at any time the number of underestimated readings exceeds the number of overestimated......

So are you suggesting that all current (sorry!) electricity suppliers are equally guilty of the perpetration of such inefficiencies?

[Serial_Apologist]

Even if that were true and demonstrable, I still question whether "these days" it would be possible - even assuming that it were desirable (which I don't) broadly to replicate the manner and matter of these industries' managements and day-to-day operations from four decades ago in what was then a very different society in so many pertinent ways.

At least it was a society, and not the one destroyed by Thatcher's Tory government, ("There's no such thing as society").

You're overlooking the fact that renationalisation to create a state monopoly in energy supply would itself determine the government's own negotiating position on suppliers and prices in the market you seem to predicate everying on continuing as it does now forever.

Another thing is the model of nationalisation used. Top-down ones (whether of the Fabian or Stalinist you-leave-it-to-us types), by paying executive salary rates and creating internal "empires", favour reinforcement of those aspects of "human nature" you see as inimical to successful operation and needs-meeting.

In the past you've dismissed bottom-up decision-making accountability on the grounds of not wanting to know, because, you've said, you're no more an owner of a nationalised industry or service than of one in private ownership; but you can't go on having it both ways while the present multiply duplicatory desicion-making set-up,with its false premise of consumer "choice" (which all consumers know to be false, they're just too exhausted to waste their lives perpetually chopping and changing between shysters), glibly carries on gobbling up the earth's resources in raw materials and ecological sustainability while fragmenting us all into individualised islands of unrealised creative potential substituting the fulfilments of involvement with dumbed down culture.