NOBODY should be deceived by yesterday’s statement from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

Its primary concern is not to advise Britain’s gas and electricity customers on how to obtain a better deal from their energy suppliers, but to maintain private ownership when even the dogs in the street know that the industry is one big racket.

Household gas prices increased by 27 per cent and electricity prices by 24 per cent between 2009 and 2013, more than twice the consumer price index (something the CMA omits to mention). Profits and dividends to fat cat shareholders have rocketed accordingly.

Investment in new generation and storage capacity has been so low that a consortium of French and Chinese companies are being bribed to invest in a dangerous expansion of nuclear power with the promise of guaranteed extra profits of billions of pounds a year over 35 years.

Yet the CMA interim report throws a bucket of whitewash over the inefficient and corrupt scandal that is Britain’s privatised energy sector.

It clears the big six racketeers — SSE, Scottish Power, Centrica, RWE Npower, Eon and EDF Energy — of using their electricity generation businesses to abuse the wholesale market to harm corporate rivals and make excessive profits. Nor have they manipulated wholesale prices or retail tariffs to cheat consumers or to lie about the reasons for charging and maintaining high prices.

In particular, there cannot be a problem of price manipulation in the wholesale gas market because Ofgem and the Financial Conduct Authority have powers of investigation and prosecution and haven’t used them.

This is the same Ofgem which has done nothing to stop the rip-off of energy consumers over the decades and the same FCA which fails so abjectly to root out the greedy spivs who run Britain’s banks and financial institutions.

Market traders like Seth Freedman, who blew the whistle on gas price rigging in 2012, must have been mistaken.
 
Reassuringly, too, EDF and other companies receiving “contracts for difference” payments for generating renewable energy in the future are likewise “unlikely” to manipulate prices in order to increase their subsidies.  

The CMA even finds no evidence that the big six co-ordinate their price rises to exploit consumers collectively and undermine competition. Those announcements of near identical price hikes so close to one another are purest coincidence.

However, the CMA does find that gas and electricity bills have outstripped costs over the past four years or so, and that loyal big six customers could have saved up to £234 a year by switching. So they should switch. And that’s about all the CMA has to propose, while promising to investigate profit margins and other matters further, keep everything under review, blah, blah, blah.

But what else should we expect?

Like Ofgem and the FCA, the CMA supports privatisation and monopoly power, while peddling the deception that “market competition” and “light touch” regulation will iron out any difficulties.

Most of the senior directors in charge of the CMA have backgrounds in business, accountancy and the City — several of them with global business consultancy CRA-Lexecon, which specialises in busting anti-trust legislation in the US and elsewhere. Like chief executive Alex Chisholm, they will happily gush about “the magic of markets to drive the growth we need.”

The current CMA inquiry is the 18th official investigation into Britain’s energy market since 2001. What people want from Labour is not yet another review or tighter regulation. It’s an election pledge to take the whole sector into public ownership, stop the subsidised profiteering, standardise the prices and start investing in a sustainable future.