Eon UK chief executive Tony Cocker claims that Labour’s proposed temporary price freeze means that the company is “undoubtedly taking a risk” by cutting gas tariffs by 3.5 per cent.

Taking the piss would be a more accurate summary of the decision by the first member of the “big six” energy cartel to trim its overcharging.

“Given the possibility of a price freeze, we are undoubtedly taking a risk today, but we always put our customers first,” he claimed.

Absolute codswallop. The firm’s shareholders and board of directors are much further up its own food chain than long-suffering consumers.

Wholesale gas prices are down 19 per cent on last winter and, as Cocker informs us, the wholesale price accounts for about half of retail tariffs.

So what would be so wrong with an immediate reduction of 9-10 per cent for residential customers?

Well, he explains with the air of someone showing great patience for the hard of thinking, that’s because Eon and its “competitors” buy gas supplies up to two years ahead to prevent price “turbulence.”

Since year-forward wholesale gas prices have fallen 28 per cent over the last 12 months, that would seem to offer further reason to lift the gas-price burden from consumers.

Using the excuse of advance purchases for not passing on falls in the global wholesale price might be valid but for the alacrity with which increases are imposed.

As every customer of all the big six cartel members knows, no sooner does the wholesale price go up than it is passed on.

Even the government has had to accept that domestic customers are being screwed by the cartel, which is why toothless “watchdog” Ofgem had to write to the energy suppliers last summer, asking them how they would pass on lower costs to their customers.

It also referred the industry to the Competition and Markets Authority, which hasn’t fazed the energy companies in the slightest.

Cocker is already asking that everyone agrees to “accept the outcome” of the Competition and Markets Authority probe when it is published at the end of this year.

The answer must be that there can be no blank cheque for yet another whitewash of one of the greatest robberies perpetrated against the people of this country —privatisation of our energy sector.

No government of whatever colour has ever dealt firmly with the private sector that was handed Britain’s North Sea oil and gas reserves and then cleaned up with our gas and electricity supply companies, followed by nuclear.

The public purse is again charged with clearing up Sellafield after the £9 billion contract awarded to private consortium Nuclear Management Partners was terminated because of cost overruns and delays.

Private oil companies are currently insisting on state subsidies to persuade them to continue to extract oil from the North Sea because they adjudge it too costly.

In view of such pandering to the private sector, who could be surprised that Eon and its friends should look so contemptuously upon the idea of passing on cost savings to consumers?

Labour’s call to give Ofgem the right to order price cuts misses the basic point that energy privatisation does not and cannot work in favour of the consumer.

Only a return to public ownership for the entire sector can end profiteering and ensure reliable and cheaper services.