Third Party Intermediaries in the Retail Energy Market consultation

Today the Utility Regulator publishes a consultation as a follow-up to its ‘Third Party Intermediaries in the Retail Energy Market’ project.

In the UR’s Forward Work Programme 2017/2018 the UR committed to a project to assess if there is a need for “Energy Broker” or Third Party Intermediary (TPI) Regulation.The project commenced in November 2017 with the publication of an information paper and call for evidence. In May 2018 we published a position paper on TPIs, which considered a variety of potential measures, before choosing to implement a program of information gathering and monitoring.

As a follow-up to the position paper, this paper consults on the proposal to ask or require licenced energy suppliers to publish TPI commissions on customer bills where these commissions are known. It also asks for further evidence from suppliers to inform the UR on TPI commissions, and how they are structured and charged by TPIs to NI non-domestic customers.