February 2024 Newsletter: How are we improving the REC?

by Anton Moden, Performance Assurance Lead

Who are the Performance Assurance team?

The Performance Assurance team monitor Party and Service Provider performance and intervene to help improve market performance - either at an individual level or market level. One of the key techniques is only providing access to REC Services once a Party demonstrates they are competent, known as market entry assurance. Our services are focused on some of the most important areas in which customers interact with the UK energy system, as shown below:

The Performance Assurance work has delivered significant improvements across many areas, including to Service Provider performance, metering processes and responding to major incidents. This newsletter will focus on how this work has made improvements to faster more reliable switching in particular.

We have monitored the use of objections, withdrawals and annulments since CSS go live. This has been really valuable, identifying the following:

• Confusion between annulments and withdrawals, that we ascribe to misunderstanding which to use in which situation. We have issued clear guidance on this and are in the process of changing the REC so it includes straightforward descriptions of when to use each.
• Inconsistencies in the switch meter read process, for which we issued better guidance.  We are still working in this area, identifying that some Parties use different processes from those in the REC and assessing whether this means that the REC needs to be updated, if this different approach causes others issues and should be addressed, or if this indicates wider problems.
• Inappropriate use of objections following investigation into organisations with higher rates of objections. This identified one organisation with system issues that automatically objected to all switches, as well as another organisation that appeared to be using ambiguities in the Change of Occupier process to block valid switches or keep customers on deemed tariffs.  We have taken action against both these organisations, to prevent the impact on customers and other suppliers who are behaving legitimately.

We do acknowledge that in the process of understanding the above issues we also requested information and support from organisations that are following appropriate processes, and would like to thank all those that helped us. At the completion of this work we acknowledged a need to more closely target our measures and reduce the incidence of false positives, so have worked with Electralink and the PAB to track more specific data. We have also revised thresholds to better reflect the differences in the domestic and non-domestic market. We are striving to develop new metrics that provide real value, like the ones that helped us identify and tackle these issues.