Performance Assurance News 

To help provide better visibility of performance assurance work, the Code Manager is trialling a monthly briefing which shares market-wide trends and insights to REC Parties.  This is our third briefing. We hope that this information is useful and would welcome feedback on this series of briefings.

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. 

All Performance Assurance Insights Articles

December 2023

December 2023 Newsletter

by Lewis Williams, Performance Assurance Analytics Manager for the Code Manager

 

At the Performance Assurance Board (PAB) meeting in November 2023, the Code Manager presented our analysis of switching trends in the market to date in 2023. The PAB Members were particularly keen to understand any changes following the end of the Energy Price Guarantee (EPG) in July 2023. In this newsletter I will be providing an overview of that analysis and the subsequent PAB discussion.
 

Key Reflections - Switching Volumes

Throughout 2023 to date, we have seen an overall steady upward trend in switch activity, from around 200,000 switches in January to around 450,000 in October. A sharper increase was observed between July and August following the end of the EPG. However, it may be the case that this is an artificially large spike, driven by the P1 Switching incident (INC0216074) that occurred in July 2023, pushing some switching activity that was due to complete in July into August.

In the above two graphs, you can see the trend in the number of completed switches over time in 2023. The top graph presents the total number of completed switch, split by internal migration and actual switching. The bottom graph shows the volume of successful switches, excluding internal migrations, split by Domestic and Non-Domestic.

It is clear that the majority of switching activity in the market YTD has been driven by internal migration activity. We estimate that 9 million of the 11.2 million switches completed this year are related to internal migrations.

The Non-Domestic market contracting cycle also drives two peaks throughout the year, in April and October. In each of these months, we can see around 70,000 extra Non-Domestic switches compared to the average across the other months of the year.
 

Switch Exception Handling

We monitor non-completed switch routes, such as objections, withdrawals and annulments primarily because the REC requires these queries between Parties to be resolved quickly to enable the consumer to reach the appropriate outcome without undue delay.  However we also monitor them because high rates can indicate issues with an individual Party’s process, or with the performance of a REC Service. the good news is that from the data, this does not appear to be the case.

The above three graphs show the trend in the rates of each event relative to the total number of successful switches (including internal migrations), one for each Domestic, Non-Domestic and total. Note that objections data was only available up to September 2023 at the time of analysis.

The above graphs show a reduction of the rates of the most unsuccessful switch outcomes over the year, with each approximately halving over the course of the year:

  • Objections: 8.9% to 4.6%
  • Annulments: 0.2% to 0.1%
  • Erroneous Switches: 0.5% to 0.2%
  • Withdrawals: 0.9% to 0.5%

The rate of objections in the Non-Domestic market is the one exception. This is perhaps unsurprising given the differences between switching activity in the Non-Domestic and Domestic markets, and there being more available reasons to object to a Non-Domestic switch than a Domestic.

Because of the way the Performance Assurance Framework is designed, these reductions in rates mean our team can spend more time identifying and driving improvements in the REC, with ongoing monitoring in place to tell us if performance changes and increased focus is required on switching.
We will also report to industry through a combination of future newsletters and Performance Assurance Webinars.

Summary

  • Switching volumes have shown a steady increase over 2023 to date.

  • The majority of switching activity is driven by internal migrations.

  • The rates of unsuccessful switch outcomes as a proportion of successful switches have declined despite the increase in switch volumes, which provides an indication that the switching process is working as intended.

  • We will continue to monitor and report on switching activity going forward.
     

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