OfGem charges up to take on power distributors but will £14m fine wake them up?

Frustration with Britain's energy market has been building up among individual and corporate customers for years

Does regulator OfGem have power to improve energy market and is it being used effectively? (PA)

The power regulator with no power, as one wag christened OfGem this morning, seems keen to prove that assertion wrong.

Having been putting the squeeze on energy suppliers, it has turned its attention to the companies that own the networks through which it is delivered (you won’t be surprised to learn that there is some overlap).

Last month the watchdog warned that they would likely have to put up with lower returns in future, although not before 2021. So while OfGem might have power, it doesn’t have quite enough to move the regulatory engine at speed.

But wait, what’s this? Perhaps it does after all.

The network operators - there are six of them that own 14 networks - have been told that their revenues could be crimped by as much as £14m right now, because while they make a handsome return on their investments, customers haven’t been feeling much in the way of benefit.

The watchdog's focus is on the treatment of big customers trying to get connected. Corporates, housing developers and the like.

Feedback from its earlier price control consolation revealed that they often struggle to get progress updates on their connection requests, and that what information they do get often lacks detail. When quotations are made for work, costs aren’t always adquately explained. Surprise, surprise.

The issue goes beyond the frustration felt by large, and often wealthy, organisations. The struggles they seem to face in getting connected to the power grid ultimately imposes an economic cost upon all of us.

Not that OfGem's findings will come as much of a surprise to the average domestic customer. Their issues tend to be with energy suppliers rather than the networks. But they still might very well nod knowingly. Shabby service seems endemic to the energy industry, because the real power lies not with the consumer, whether large or small, but with the companies that operate within it.

Whether a £14m revenue reduction proposed by a watchdog that is supposed to level the unequal playing field - in reality a fine by another name - will be enough to shake this part of the market up is open to question.

It might seem like a big number, but when you consider the size of the companies that operate electricity networks, it really isn’t. It’s another slapped wrist; a “must try harder” at the bottom of a report card.

Sometimes they work. More usually, they don’t.

The fact that OfGem wants to show us that it’s charging up its generators, now the issue is close to the top of the political agenda, is still a welcome change from the complacency that used to be the rule.

But frustrations with Britain’s energy market from both domestic and corporate customers have been building up for years. It will take a supercharged improvement in the behaviour of the industry to damp them, and criticism of the regulator's performance, down.