Compliance Failure

There is a word for the combination of state and corporate power to the point of physical violence, and of which Paul Knaggs writes:

In early 2023, an undercover reporter from The Times joined Arvato Financial Solutions, a debt collection firm working on contract for British Gas, and went out with its agents. He was there as they forced their way into the home of a single father of three to fit a prepayment meter. Job notes seen by the paper showed it was no one-off. Other forced fittings included a woman whose notes read ‘severe mental health bipolar’, a partially sighted woman with mobility problems, and a mother whose disabled daughter relied on a hoist and an electric wheelchair. The paper reported that the agents were paid bonuses for the meters they fitted. Those agents were not stumbling through paperwork in the dark. The vulnerability was on the file, and the regulator’s rules said the most vulnerable must be spared. The meter went in regardless, because a debt was owed and a bonus was waiting. 

Now the part that should stop every reader cold. None of it was a crime. The agents arrived with warrants from magistrates’ courts, some of which were reported to be granting applications by the hundred in a single sitting. Nobody was charged. When Ofgem finally closed its investigation in May this year, more than three years later, it found that British Gas had breached licence conditions meant to protect vulnerable customers, and that its management had been warned by an external review in 2018 and an internal audit in 2021. The penalty was a £20 million settlement and a debt write-off. A door forced open on a disabled family was, in law, a compliance failure.

So what does the government propose to protect households from the next boot at the door? Ministers will point to tougher powers for Ofgem. Yet in the same bill they propose to widen the gateway, letting the state share household income, benefit, pension and property records with this same industry. These companies already knew which customers were vulnerable, and their contractors went in anyway. And the safeguard on offer this time? Misuse of the data will be a criminal offence. Now we are expected to trust the same industry with an even more detailed picture of our financial circumstances. A file marked vulnerable did not protect people from the debt collectors; they used the information they had and kicked the door in anyway. Why should handing over more of not only their private data, but everyone’s data, make them or us any safer?

A Door Taken Off its Hinges 

The Energy Independence Bill, presented to the House of Commons on 4 November by Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh, arrives under the familiar banner of modernisation. Ministers sell the legislation on grid connections, North Sea licences and a tougher energy regulator. Tucked inside the machinery sits an amendment to sections 36 and 37 of the Digital Economy Act 2017. That was the narrow gateway Parliament opened nine years ago, permitting state departments to disclose data to commercial energy suppliers for a single, tightly restricted objective: assisting households in fuel poverty. This new bill takes that door entirely off its hinges. The statutory gateway broadens to capture anyone facing high energy bills, a hard-to-heat home, or extra domestic expenses arising from a chronic health condition. The approved recipients multiply from licensed domestic suppliers to network operators and, in the energy department’s own words, ‘other bodies involved in designing or delivering energy support measures in the future’. Not one of those outside contractors or intermediaries is named on the face of the statute.

According to reporting by the Press Association, eight separate government datasets are brought within scope. Four draw directly on personal state archives: HM Revenue and Customs income records and child benefit ledgers, Department for Work and Pensions benefit and state pension files, property registers, and domestic energy performance ratings. The information traffic is designed to run in both directions. Once a support mechanism is operational, private energy firms could be compelled to surrender their own internal customer histories back to the state. Ministers will protest that nothing becomes active before the winter of 2028-29, and that Whitehall departments will face no statutory compulsion to share immediately. But a loaded statutory power left lying on the statute book is never made safe by the reassurance that nobody intends to fire it this morning.

The Fox, the Henhouse and the Keys

Energy Suppliers, Insider Leaks and Household Data Risks

The foundational premise of this legislation is that the energy cartel can be trusted with the most intrusive financial dossier of British households ever assembled. The sole safeguard offered to reassure the public is a criminal offence. We already know what a criminal penalty is worth inside this corporate culture, because we have watched one fail in real time. In 2018, Chintan Paida, a call-centre worker employed by British Gas in Coventry, spent six months quietly harvesting private customer records: names, home addresses, dates of birth, and energy consumption patterns across 1,700 accounts. He sold the stolen dossier to commercial brokers for £45,000. His contractual duty was to verify customer identities, meaning every query he launched registered as legitimate on internal audit logs. British Gas discovered the leak only when customers began fielding unsolicited cold calls that matched their internal account data. He pleaded guilty in 2025 under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Theft Act 1968.

The criminal statute was in force every single day he sold that data. It did not deter him for a second. The law caught up with him seven years later, long after the files had dispersed across the unregulated broker market. That is all a criminal sanction represents in practice: a padlock fitted to an empty stable after the horse has already been traded into an illicit spreadsheet. The courts rarely make the penalty sting, either. When an employee at a car-hire firm sold nearly 28,000 customer records for £5,000, the court imposed a £1,000 fine, prompting the Information Commissioner’s Office to plead once more for custodial sentencing powers that Parliament continues to withhold. Place the two scandals side by side. Arvato demonstrates what the energy monopolies do with records of vulnerability when there is a debt to pursue. Paida demonstrates what an individual insider does with basic customer records when a criminal easy earner is offered.

This legislation opens the door to sharing income figures, child benefit information, state pension records and property data with private energy companies and potentially their contractors. The same industry, the same commercial pressures and the same risks of human failure. We have already seen what basic customer information was worth on the black market: roughly £26 per household. Now imagine the value of a verified salary, matched to a home address, date of birth, pension and benefits history. A criminal wouldn’t need to spend weeks piecing together your personal circumstances. One dishonest insider, one stolen database or one successful cyberattack could potentially hand them the lot in a single transaction.

And spare us the comforting assurances about cybersecurity. Banks, government departments and multinational corporations spend fortunes protecting their systems, yet data breaches still happen. What makes ministers think private energy companies and their contractors are somehow immune? Their servers are not automatically held to the same security requirements as government systems, and even the strongest safeguards cannot eliminate the threat from hackers or corrupt employees. Every additional company given access to sensitive records creates another potential point of failure. The more information held together, the greater the damage when something goes wrong.

We have enough real-world examples to know that no database is impregnable. In 2021 npower shut down its app for good after criminals used stolen passwords to break into customer accounts, taking contact details, dates of birth, addresses and, for some customers, sort codes and part of their bank account numbers. E.ON, which owns npower, had closed its own app after a similar attack only weeks earlier. People’s Energy, a small Scottish supplier, lost the personal details of its entire customer base, around 270,000 current and former customers. None of those systems held anyone’s tax records. Under this bill, the next one might. Every company handed a copy of this data becomes one more target, and sooner or later every target is tested.

DESNZ insists the bill ‘does not change individuals’ privacy or data protection rights’. Strictly, that is true. Your rights stay exactly where they were. What changes is the number of organisations holding your data, the number of desks it can be reached from, and the price it fetches when it walks out of the building. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero insists that the bill ‘does not change individuals’ privacy or data protection rights’. In the narrowest, most sterile legal sense, that is true. Your statutory rights remain printed in the law books. What changes is the number of commercial entities holding your personal files, the number of private computer terminals from which your earnings can be read, and the price those files fetch when they walk out of the building.

A Sharper Instrument, not a Dragnet

The government’s public justification deserves a fair hearing, because it addresses an undeniable social failure. Officials point out that 42 per cent of households living in fuel poverty claim no state benefits at all, and that around half of the poorest families are projected to miss the Warm Home Discount entirely. Support today is rationed either by benefit entitlement or property band, and both metrics leave desperate people behind. A pensioner living on a modest private annuity, in a terraced house bought half a century ago, is asset-rich on paper while freezing in her kitchen. A low-paid worker who never claimed state support, whether out of pride or administrative confusion, simply does not exist on departmental computers. Direct tax data would find those forgotten households. Nobody should pretend otherwise.

Yet the answer to a blunt instrument is a sharper instrument, not a universal dragnet. The sharper mechanism has been functioning for years. Under the Warm Home Discount scheme, the Department for Work and Pensions already matches records against supplier lists. Energy companies submit customer names, addresses and meter serials; civil servants execute the match and return a simple eligibility identifier for each qualifying account. The supplier learns that the household qualifies for a bill credit. It never learns the personal details behind the qualification. That is the architecture Open Rights Group fought for in 2016, establishing the basic civil liberty principle that utility providers need to know only that a customer is entitled to relief.

A binary data flag reaches the hidden poor without surrendering their lives to a corporate ledger. Why, then, has the state engineered a pipeline to hand over the underlying file? Because the file does a second job. The government’s own impact assessments concede that if an energy scheme is funded through domestic bills, its costs will fall ‘principally on those most able to pay’, and that households deemed ineligible are ‘expected to face higher bills’. As Byline Times revealed, departmental documents speak openly of data matching to identify ‘households most able to fund the scheme’. Finding whom to help requires a list of the poor. Finding whom to charge requires an inventory of everybody. And everyone means everyone under the roof. HMRC taxes individuals, not households, and an energy account sits in one name.

If ministers intend to measure who is truly “most able to pay”, a supplier cannot simply check the person whose name happens to sit at the top of the direct debit, or every higher-earning household would put the gas bill in the lowest earner’s name tomorrow morning. To calculate household ability to pay, the state has to pull the tax and benefit records of partners, adult children and every other earner under the same roof. One meter on the wall becomes the hook on which an entire family’s financial file is hung.

The government already knows how this goes wrong. Under the High Income Child Benefit Charge, a couple each earning £59,999 keep the full benefit, while a single earner on £60,001 starts to lose it. Labour dropped the plan to move that charge to household income in 2024, saying it would cost too much; one analyst noted it would have been a huge administrative task for HMRC to assess couples together. The alternative is worse. To measure what a household earns, the state must first decide who lives in it, then pull the tax records of every adult in the house: the partner, the grown-up son on a zero-hours contract, the lodger. None of them signed the energy contract. All of them would be matched. The bill and its factsheets do not say which way ministers will jump. Either the scheme is unfair, or it is a dragnet.

The Tax That Never Faces a Vote 

Strip away the reassuring language of ‘support schemes’ and ‘cost recovery’ and look at the machinery being assembled. Ministers are creating powers to place additional costs on household energy bills, potentially charging some customers more to subsidise others according to their financial circumstances. A compulsory payment, collected through the price of heat and light, necessities no household can simply refuse to buy. Call it redistribution, call it a social tariff, dress it up in whatever Whitehall language you please. If the cost is imposed on one group of households to finance another, it begins to look remarkably like taxation by another name. It is a tax in every respect save one. Taxes are voted on in the House of Commons.

And that is where the democratic problem begins. Taxes face parliamentary scrutiny, yet this Bill creates no actual support scheme, sets no rate and identifies no final list of who will pay. Instead, Sections 104 and 108 hand the Secretary of State broad powers to establish schemes through secondary legislation and determine how their costs are recovered. The government’s own factsheet confirms that energy suppliers must be able to recover those costs in full. More troubling still, Section 114 explicitly places regulations under this chapter within the negative resolution procedure. They can become law without MPs voting to approve them, unless Parliament subsequently intervenes. According to the House of Commons Library, no motion to annul an instrument under that procedure has succeeded in the Commons since 1979.

And as Byline Times notes, the default statutory route is the negative procedure: regulations pass into law automatically unless MPs actively force an objection, meaning most are enacted without a word of debate. The government’s factsheet remains silent on whether a vote will ever take place. Think about what that means. Parliament is being asked to approve the framework now, while ministers retain considerable discretion over who qualifies, who pays, how much they contribute and how the whole arrangement operates. These decisions could be made through regulations that Parliament cannot amend and may never debate. The Chancellor need not announce each charge at the dispatch box on Budget day. The household discovers the consequences when its energy bill arrives. That is the Orwellian danger at the heart of this proposal: financial decisions affecting millions of households could be made with far less democratic scrutiny than an ordinary tax.

Britain has been down some peculiar roads when governments start using household circumstances as a measure of what people ought to pay. In 1696, William III introduced the window tax, treating the number of windows in a property as a rough measure of wealth. People responded by bricking them up, sacrificing daylight and ventilation to escape the charge. The tax survived until 1851, when medical objections to its consequences helped secure its repeal. Then came Margaret Thatcher’s community charge, introduced in Scotland in 1989 and England and Wales in 1990. The poll tax required authorities to identify the adults living at each address. According to parliamentary research, an estimated 350,000 people disappeared from electoral registers during that period to avoid being caught by the system.

This scheme is no flat poll tax. It is graded by income, and its defenders will call it progressive. Yet its machinery rhymes with both of its ancestors. An income-related contribution would plainly differ from Thatcher’s flat-rate charge. But history offers a warning about what happens when governments build financial obligations around the contents of a household. If ministers assess only the named bill payer, what prevents a higher-income household from putting the account in the name of its lowest earner? If they assess total household income, whose earnings count? The husband, the wife, the adult son still living at home, the daughter paying her parents a little board, or a lodger renting the spare bedroom? And does the presence of an earning adult automatically mean their income is available to pay everybody else’s bills?

The Bill does not settle those questions. Yet they are fundamental to whether any income-related scheme could operate fairly. One approach risks people rearranging their accounts to qualify for help or avoid charges. The other raises the prospect of wider financial checks on people who may not even be named on the energy account. The state would have to decide whose income belongs to the household and how much of it ought to be available to pay for energy. That is a considerable intrusion into private family circumstances for something presented as a straightforward reform of energy bills.

Now consider who is being asked to shoulder the burden, and who is being protected from it. Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, reported adjusted operating profits of £1.55 billion in 2024 and £814 million in 2025. Its chief executive, Chris O’Shea, received total remuneration of £4.73 million for 2025, including £3.57 million in variable pay and long-term share awards. Research for the End Fuel Poverty Coalition puts Centrica’s accumulated operating profits since 2020 at more than £9 billion. Those figures cover the wider business, including energy trading, generation and infrastructure, rather than household supply alone. That distinction matters, but so does the sheer scale of the money.

There are already windfall taxes on parts of the energy industry, including North Sea producers and electricity generators. Yet the government’s proposed framework also makes provision for the costs of household energy support to be passed between customers, with suppliers entitled to recover their expenditure. So while one family struggles to heat its home, another may be required to help pay the bill, even as substantial profits continue to be made elsewhere in the energy system. Ministers should have to explain why that is the preferred arrangement, rather than expecting households to accept it as an administrative necessity. 

Even supporters of a social tariff recognise the problem. Simon Francis of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition welcomed the prospect of better targeted help but criticised the decision to put funding through household bills first, arguing that asking households to subsidise other households should be the last resort. He has also warned about the danger of support being withdrawn through secondary legislation without proper parliamentary debate. Nobody should object to protecting pensioners, disabled people or families who cannot afford to keep warm. But Parliament ought to decide openly how that protection is funded, whose income is examined and what safeguards exist against unfair charges. The working class should not be left paying for an energy system whose profits remain private while the burden of making it affordable is passed from one household to another. The companies recover their costs. Ministers retain their powers. The household gets the bill.

The Terms of Parliamentary Resistance 

Protecting the hidden poor does not require opening the nation’s Personal Data to corporate boards. Members of Parliament must refuse to wave this measure through without writing non-negotiable statutory safeguards onto the face of the bill. Write the data flag into primary law: government computers must execute the matching internally, commercial suppliers must receive nothing more than a verification mark beside an eligible account number, and no HMRC income record must ever cross onto a private corporate server. Name every single body permitted to handle this data directly in the statute, closing the open-ended clause that allows ministers to license commercial intermediaries by decree. Require that every support scheme, and every decision dictating who pays for it, passes through the affirmative procedure, forcing ministers to stand before the Commons and cast a recorded vote. Fund targeted fuel poverty relief out of public money through progressive taxation, where rates are openly set by Parliament and tax records remain inside the revenue service where they belong.

Then look past the immediate legislative text to the material question underneath it. A publicly owned energy supply, answerable to Parliament and run for the common good, would never require the state to farm out tax records under threat of the criminal law, because the infrastructure would remain in public hands. Who inspects your wages is, in the final analysis, inseparable from who owns the grid. And here’s a thought. If the government already knows that around 42 per cent of fuel-poor households receive no qualifying benefits, why isn’t it concentrating on using the information held by its own departments to identify those missing out and get support to them? Why does that require widening access to people’s private financial information across the energy industry? 

Why Working-Class Households Pay Twice Under This Bill 

Who actually benefits from this settlement? Not the widowed pensioner, who could have been protected by an anonymous data flag. Not the low-paid worker, sorted into a punitive payment band by a commercial utility she never chose to confide in. The beneficiaries are a Treasury eager to run social welfare off the public balance sheet, and a cartel of private energy monopolies granted an exhaustive financial profile of the population alongside a statutory guarantee that every penny of their costs will be recovered. The working class pays twice: once with their private data, and again at the prepayment meter. This industry once used the law to break down front doors and force meters onto the vulnerable. Parliament is now being asked to hand it the key to the filing cabinet.